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...

Iowa City Book Festival

Writers' Workshop graduate Max Allan Collins will read from Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness and the Battle for Chicago

Max Allan Collins is a frequent Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” nominee in both fiction and non-fiction categories, he has earned an unprecedented 18 Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels, True Detective and Stolen Away. His graphic novel Road to Perdition (1998) is the basis of...

Iowa City Book Festival

Writers' Workshop graduate Rick Harsch will read from his new novel, “Voices After Evelyn”

Rick Harsch appeared on the American literary scene in 1997 with the cult classic The Driftless Zone, followed by Billy Verite and Sleep of the Aborigines (all Steerforth Press) to form The Driftless Trilogy. Born and bred in the Midwest, Harsch received degrees in sociology and history from UW La Crosse, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He migrated to the Slovene...