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...

This spring, the Stanley Reads book group features What Napoleon Could Not Do, the debut novel of Derek (DK) Nnuro, the museum’s curator of special projects. The club will meet three times over the spring semester to discuss the novel and discover how objects in the Homecoming exhibition connect with themes in the book. Nnuro will also be on hand to answer questions about the novel and engage participants in craft discussions. We encourage budding writers—especially writers of fiction—to join us...