Prairie Lights Virtual - Zoom

Please join us to celebrate the paperback release of Adrienne Raphel's book, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them. Adrienne Raphel will be joined by fellow Iowa Writers' Workshop alum, Micah Bateman.

To join this virtual event, register here.

The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice, says of the book, “This cultural and personal history of crosswords and their fans, written by an aficionado, is diverting, informative, and discursive.” Mary Norris, bestselling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, says: "For crossword puzzlers of every ilk, from solvers of the Monday-edition no-brainer to pencil-chewing addicts of the cryptic, Thinking Inside The Box is a gold mine of revelations. If there is a pantheon of cruciverbalist scholars, Adrienne Raphel has established herself squarely within it.”

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them (Penguin Press, 2020), and What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). Her essays, poetry, and criticism appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Paris Review Daily, Slate, and other publications. Born in New Jersey and raised in Vermont, Raphel holds a PhD in English from  Harvard  University, an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an AB from Princeton University. She is currently a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program.

Micah Bateman teaches, writes, and presents on poetry, digital media, libraries, and creative writing out of the University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop; co-author of Mapping the Imaginary: Supporting Creative Writers through Programming, Prompts, and Research (ALA Editions: 2019); and author of a chapbook of poems, Polis (Catenary Press: 2015).  Other work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

^{Photo credit | Nina Subin}