Mark your calendars to take part in our 100-Word Microstory Contest—a free online writing competition for a variety of age groups. You don't have to be an Iowa Writers' Workshop grad—or even have participated in a flash writing contest before—to join in the fun. Just create a story in 100 words or less that uses one of two specific writing prompts. We will announce the writing prompts on our website on Monday, July 10, 2023, at 9 a.m. CDT. Learn more: https://www.foriowa.org/write-now...

Iowa City author Louisa Hall will read from her genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a country in crisis, Reproduction. "I read this novel in a single rapturous sitting, torn between the desire to hurtle through its hypnotic prose and the desire to reread every perfect sentence. Reproduction exquisitely captures the lunacy of inhabiting an animal body with a human mind, and somehow manages also to be gross, funny, heartrending, and formally...

Writers' Workshop graduate Jeff Boyd will read from The Weight. "Like Binx Bolling, the hero of Walker Percy's classic The Moviegoer, Jeff Boyd is on a search. And like Binx's, the object of that search is too essential and nebulous and all-encompassing to name. It has to do with love, of course, and human connection, and ultimate truths, but in Boyd's case it extends past the final limits of racism to touch upon the universal existential terrors of an Everyman. Boyd has August Wilson's scope...

Iowa Writers' Workshop alum and Iowa Summer Writing Festival favorite Sabrina Orah Mark will read from her new book, Happily: A Personal History-With Fairy Tales. "With milk teeth, bread crumbs, pebbles, and tears, Sabrina Orah Mark illumines the outermost expanses of motherhood's chaos, cruelty, and love. She confidently wields the weird logic of the fairy tale; bewitched, I didn't even try to distinguish the real from the unreal. I just wanted to follow this thrillingly distinctive book...