Poets Austin Smith and Dora Malech will read from their new poetry collections.

Austin Smith will read from Flyover Country, a collection of poems drawing on his Illinois childhood on a dairy farm. Smith challenges the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” while suggesting America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad in a state of perpetual war Americans seem helpless to stop. “A book of vital and generative reckoning.”—Jane...

Sarah Heyward will give a Q&A about screenwriting in the Frank Conroy Reading Room on October 24th at 4pm

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College, Heyward has worked as a writer and producer on acclaimed shows including Girls (2012), The Bicycle (2013), and SKAM Austin (2018). D.T. Max, writing for The New Yorker, says that SKAM Austin is “structurally dazzling” and “may be the future of TV.” For her work on Girls, Heyward received the Writers Guild of America Award for...

Join us for a lively dual reading from Bell & Merrill's work-in-progress If & When. They’ll be joined in conversation by Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review in which excerpts of the new book have just been published.

Free – All are Welcome!

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 Oct. 21:
Lolita Copacabana is an Argentinian writer, editor, and translator, and the author of Buena leche - Diarios de una joven [no tan] formal (2006) and the novel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2015). In 2017, she was included in the Hay Festival’s ‘Bogotá 39,’ a...