Featured literary event - Literary crawl through downtown Iowa CityVenue: VariousDate: Friday, April 4Round 1: 5:00 - 5:50 PMRound 2: 6:00 - 6:50 PMRound 3: 7:30 - 8:20 PMAfterparty at The Greenhouse: 8:30 PMAdmission: Free and open to the public!The annual MCF Lit Walk returns in 2025 with several rounds of speakers at your favorite local hotspots. Bringing Iowa City to life in new ways, hear an unexpected variety of work from a mix of talented local and out-of-town writers.Round One (5:00):Rev...

Karen Russell will read from her new novel, The Antidote, in conversation with Kaveh Akbar. Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and selected for the National Book...

Writers' Workshop alum Stuart Nadler will read from his newest novel, Rooms for Vanishing, which is a "prismatic, mind-bending family epic about the splintering of a Jewish family from Vienna—exploring the weight of exile and how grief twists our sense of the impossible" (stuartnadler.net). Kirkus Reviews describes Rooms for Vanishing as "beautifully written," while Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily and Wild Milk, says, "With masterful precision and an eye flecked with mysticism, Nadler...

English Department VIEWS presents: Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan Lethem’s genre-defying fiction weaves the conventions of noirs, westerns, science fiction, and graphic novels into something both evocative and wholly original. The “bard of Brooklyn” (LitHub) is the author of more than a dozen books — including the much-lauded novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude — and the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. Books will be available for purchase.