Writers' Workshop graduate Ada Zhang will read from her fiction collection, The Sorrows of Others. "The characters in The Sorrows of Others would make an uncommon and special botanical collection had they been plants: They have their given roots—Chinese or Chinese American—that bind them to their shared history, and yet they also each nurture their own set of roots, expanding, liberating, and redefining themselves. Ada Zhang is a bighearted and sensitive writer, and these stories, looking...

Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Abraham Verghese will read from his NYT Bestseller, The Covenant of Water. “Much will be written about Abraham Verghese’s multigenerational South Indian novel in the coming months and years. As we’ve seen with Verghese’s earlier fiction, there will be frequent references to that other celebrated doctor-writer, Anton Chekhov. There will also be continued invocations of the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to describe Verghese’s ambitious literary scope and...

Join us for the International Writing Program's Prairie Lights Reading Series this Sunday to hear readings by two 2023 Fall Residency writers and one University of Iowa MFA student. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (poet, scholar, editor, translator; Hong Kong) is the author of a story collection, an academic monograph on neo-Victorian cannibalism and two volumes of poetry; a third volume will appear in 2024. She is the editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the English-language editor at Voice &...

Iowa Writers' Workshop alum J.C. Hallman will read from Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women's Health. In 1846, a young surgeon, J. Marion Sims ("The Father of Gynecology"), began several years of experimental surgeries on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha ("The Mother of Gynecology"). This series of procedures—performed without anesthesia and resulting in Anarcha's so-called "cure"—forever altered the path of women's health. "This...