Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Jeff Boyd will read from his new novel Hard Times and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa Visiting Assistant Professor James F. Thomas. Described as "An extraordinary crime novel from a rising star, that follows the ripple effects of a tragic shooting throughout a Chicago community from the view of the teachers, police officers, and students impacted" (us.macmillan.com), Hard Times is praised by Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling...

Join us for a reading with Workshop visiting faculty member, Farnoosh Fathi and the English department's Director of the English and Creative Writing Major, Associate Professor Louisa Hall.

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of the poetry collections Great Guns (Canarium 2013) and Granny Cloud (NYRB Poets 2024), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets 2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York. Her research...

In addition to his latest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He has...

Benjamin Hale will read from his new book, Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa Associate Professor, Bennett Sims. Praised by Patton Oswalt as "The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read," Cave Mountain tells the true story of how Hale's cousin, Haley, disappeared in a mountain trail in the Ozarks when she was only 6 years old in 2001. After Haley was found, she spoke of...