Rebecca Lehmann will read from her new novel, The Beheading Game, and will be joined in conversation with Paige Lewis. The Beheading Game "begins in the hours after Anne Boleyn’s beheading, when she wakes to find herself unceremoniously laid to rest in a makeshift coffin, her head wrapped in linen at her knees" and continues with "Anne escapes the Tower of London, sews her head back on, then sets out on a quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry her own lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour" (penguinrandomhouse.com). It's praised by author Kelly Link as "A marvelously inventive and mythic reworking of the story of Anne Boleyn," while Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword, says: "Magic, romance, revenge, and an utterly irresistible heroine — this book is an instant classic."

Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize (selected by Ross Gay); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College.

Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019) and the novel Canon (Viking Press, 2026). They co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books, 2023) with Kaveh Akbar. Paige teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}