Writers' Workshop and Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program graduate Jen Percy will read from her newest book, Girls Play Dead, and will be joined in conversation with former Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program professor Kerry Howley. Girls Play Dead is described as "a landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and pervasive issues of our time — sexual violence ... blending investigative reportage and memoir to explore the misunderstood ways women survive and forever carry trauma ... Since her own girlhood in rural Oregon, Jen Percy has long contemplated the inter-generational trauma passed down through three generations of women, drawing from the survival lessons of her naturalist mother and her grandmother, who fled to a woman-led cult. But Percy is confounded by her own passive responses to male attention, setting off a broader inquiry into how fear shapes behavior. Through personal narrative and a chorus of voices from across the world, Percy examines psychic disconnection, freezing, hypersexuality, near-death experiences, and the evolutionary instincts that emerge in moments of peril. She takes on taboo subjects — female orgasms during assault, female rage, and people-pleasing behaviors — illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviant or pathological rather than as brilliant acts of self-preservation. Her work challenges the rigid cultural scripts that define what a 'real victim' should look like, and how we misunderstand passivity, wildness, and survival in the context of sex and violence." (jenpercy.com).

Jennifer Percy is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. She is the author of the nonfiction book DEMON CAMP (Scribner), which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Percy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship, as well as a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Percy has received numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Harper's, BookForum, The New Republic, Esquire, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University in NYC.

Kerry Howley is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of Bottom’s Up and the Devil Laughs, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In the Times, critic Jennifer Szalai called Bottom’s Up “riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” Howley’s first book, Thrown, was a pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues, translated into five languages, and named among the top 100 books of the year in the New York Times. Howley is the screenwriter behind WINNER, a film directed by Susanna Fogel starring Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, and Zach Galifianakus. The coming of age comedy debuted at Sundance in 2024. In 2020 Howley left a professorship at the University of Iowa’s celebrated Nonfiction MFA program to join the staff of New York Magazine, where she has published essays about Erewhon, Jorie Graham, and January 6th. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Harper’s. A 2025 Guggenheim Foundation fellow, Lannan Foundation Fellow and three-time National Magazine Award nominee, she divides her time between Iowa City and Los Angeles.

_{To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.
Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}