The Iowa City Book Festival presents Donika Kelly and Melissa Febos, who will read from their work.

2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner and 2016 National Book Award long-listed poet Donika Kelly will read from Bestiary: Poems. 

“What a gorgeous book of poems. The love poems, in particular, are striking with unexpected ideas and imagery coalescing into poetry about this thing called love. . . . This one, I savored.” ―Roxane Gay

Donika Kelly’s poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Indi...

The Iowa City Book Festival presents Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, who will read from House of Stone.

“With luminous language, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma explores the treacherous terrain of colonization and decolonization, remembering and forgetting, and love and betrayal. The result is a gripping account of revolution and its aftermath, both for a country and for one man.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma grew up in Zimbabwe and lives in Houston, Texas. Her short story collection, Shadows, won the 2014...

In 2010, Don Waters set out to write a magazine story about a surfing icon who had known his absentee father. It was an attempt to find a way of connecting to a man he never knew. He didn’t imagine that the story would become a years-long quest to understand a man who left behind almost nothing except for a self-absorbed autobiography for his abandoned son.

These Boys and Their Fathers touches on Waters’ early life with his single mother—and her string of dysfunctional men—and his later search...

The Iowa City Book Festival Presents Eileen Pollack, who will read from her new novel based loosely on Unabomber Ted Kaczinski, The Professor of Immortality.

"A Perfect Life probes how we live in the face of uncertainty and the ways risk can both disable and empower us. In her latest novel, Eileen Pollack has crafted a tender exploration of family love that is as smart and thought-provoking as it is moving." —Celeste Ng

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Pollack is the author of the...