Benjamin Hale will read from his new book, Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa Associate Professor, Bennett Sims. Praised by Patton Oswalt as "The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read," Cave Mountain tells the true story of how Hale's cousin, Haley, disappeared in a mountain trail in the Ozarks when she was only 6 years old in 2001. After Haley was found, she spoke of an "'imaginary friend' she met in the woods [who] would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than 20 years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet" (harpercollins.com). Cave Mountain is, as Harper Collins puts it, "Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks [and] is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil."

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College and Columbia University, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the collection White Dialogues. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

_{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.}