Events Archive

Current Semester

Live from Prairie Lights: Roy Scranton in Conversation with Zach Savich
Tuesday, July 17, 2018 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We're Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time.

Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what?  

Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic...

Eleventh Hour Lecture Series : The MFA at Any Age
Tuesday, July 17, 2018 11:00am
Phillips Hall

Is there a right time to get your MFA? This hour will feature a panel of graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who came to the program at different ages, some earlier in life, others having already established lives, families, and careers. Panelists will talk and answer questions about the benefits and challenges of attending graduate school earlier or later in life, what it was like to be in workshop, what it was like to manage school and family, and what the MFA experience offered them in...

Live from Prairie Lights: Thomas Fox Averill promotional image
Live from Prairie Lights: Thomas Fox Averill
Friday, July 13, 2018 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Thomas Fox Averill will read from his novel Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr. Told entirely through fictional journals, letters, photos, drawings, notes, and clippings, Found Documents follows Nell’s life in Lawrence, Kansas, between 1854 and 1889, where she first discovers fossils her house’s foundation.  

“Averill has a remarkable facility for expressing wisdom in the simplest of language. Indeed, sincerity—in both language and feeling—is a signature feature of this unique...

Live from Prairie Lights: Tom Macher
Wednesday, July 11, 2018 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Writers’ Workshop graduate Tom Macher will read from his memoir, Halfway, about his time spent in boys’ homes and halfway houses as a teen. “In Tom Macher’s tough new memoir, halfway is a condition of the heart and soul as much as it is a refuge for wayward boys… Many of the boys we meet along the way don’t make it, but one of them endures, and a lone voice survives, as Tom Macher returns to tell this beautiful tale.” —Charles d’Ambrosio

Tom Macher grew up in Georgia, New York, and California...