Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Malinda McCullom will read from her short story collection The Surprising Place. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, these 12 stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories explore confrontation as equally as consolation.

McCollum’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Epoch, ZYZZYVA, and the anthologies The Worst Years of Your Life and The Paris Review Book of People with Problems. She currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she teaches writing at the College of Charleston.