Writers’ Workshop graduates Chris Bolin and Abby Chew will read from their recent poetry collections.

Chris Bolin will read from Form from Form. “In its austere tableaux and impersonal but poetically authoritative language, Bolin’s work . . . creat[es] an overall and haunting impression of mankind’s struggle with the material world as he tries to tame, engineer, modify, exploit, find a place in, and save it.” —Geoffrey Nutter, author of Cities at Dawn 

Christopher Bolin is also the author of...

Sundays this fall: The International Writing Program (IWP) and UI MFA writing programs take over the 2nd floor of Prairie Lights – grab a glass of wine or a fancy soda and settle in for an hour of highlights from their best work!
Reading this Sunday, Oct. 7, as part of the Iowa City Book Festival:
MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers Workshop in Fiction:
Sarah Thankam Mathews (USA) grew up between Oman, India, and Canada, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She has work published or...

Iowa City Book Festival

Writers' Workshop graduates Tameka Cage Conley and Derek Nnuro present, "The Reclamation Workshop: Our Mothers As Homeland"

This performance workshop features two writers, one African and the other African American, in direct conversation with each other, interrogating themes of family, heartbreak, class, and childhood. Anchored in the maternal audacity of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Derek Nnuro and Tameka Cage Conley will perform a series of letters written to each other...

Iowa City Book Festival 

Writers’ Workshop graduate Fatima Farheen Mirza will read from her New York Times bestselling novel, A Place for Us. “As Marilynne Robinson has done with Protestants and Alice McDermott has done with Catholics, Mirza finds in the intensity of a faithful Muslim family a universal language of love and anguish that speaks to us all.”—Washington Post

Fatima Farheen Mirza is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She was raised in California, and currently lives...