Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events

Live from Prairie Lights | Carrie Olivia Adams & Nathan Hoks in conversation with Danielle Wheeler  promotional image

Live from Prairie Lights | Carrie Olivia Adams & Nathan Hoks in conversation with Danielle Wheeler

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Carrie Olivia Adams will read from her new poetry collection, The Book of Marys and Glaciers, and Nathan Hoks will read from his new paperback edition of his poetry collection, Moony Days of Being. They will be joined in conversation with Danielle Wheeler.

Described by Tupelo Press as a collection of poems that "engag[e] with deserts, consumerism, Alaskan ice, religious icons, and more," The Book of Marys and Glaciers is praised by Marisa Siegel of The Rumpus, who says, "Adams challenges her...

Live from Prairie Lights | Rebecca Lehmann in conversation with Paige Lewis - 'The Beheading Game' promotional image

Live from Prairie Lights | Rebecca Lehmann in conversation with Paige Lewis - 'The Beheading Game'

Wednesday, April 22, 2026 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Rebecca Lehmann will read from her new novel, The Beheading Game, and will be joined in conversation with Paige Lewis. The Beheading Game "begins in the hours after Anne Boleyn’s beheading, when she wakes to find herself unceremoniously laid to rest in a makeshift coffin, her head wrapped in linen at her knees" and continues with "Anne escapes the Tower of London, sews her head back on, then sets out on a quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry her own lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour" (penguin...

Book Reading by Keiichiro Hirano promotional image

Book Reading by Keiichiro Hirano

Thursday, April 23, 2026 5:00pm to 6:15pm
University Capitol Centre
Join the University of Iowa (UI) Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, an International Programs affinity group, for a special event with acclaimed Japanese author Keiichiro Hirano.
Live from Prairie Lights | Readings from translations of the work of Kim Hyesoon: Jack Saebyok Jung for 'Lady No' & Cindy Juyoung Ok for 'The Hell of That Star'  promotional image

Live from Prairie Lights | Readings from translations of the work of Kim Hyesoon: Jack Saebyok Jung for 'Lady No' & Cindy Juyoung Ok for 'The Hell of That Star'

Friday, April 24, 2026 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Visiting Professor of the Iowa Writers' Workshop Jack Saebyok Jung will read from his new translation of Kim Hyesoon's Lady No, and Cindy Juyoung Ok will read from her new translation of Hyesoon's The Hell of That Star.

Lady No is described by publisher Ecco Press as the following:

"In March 2014, Kim Hyesoon, the grand dame of contemporary Korean poetry, began to post anonymously on the online blog of Munhakdongne, a major South Korean publisher. Rather than use her own name, Kim Hyesoon’s chosen...

Write at the Stanley: A Generative Writing Workshop promotional image

Write at the Stanley: A Generative Writing Workshop

Sunday, April 26, 2026 2:30pm to 4:15pm
Stanley Museum of Art

Join us monthly to generate new creative writing inspired by works in the Stanley collection. Each session will be led by a different talented writer from our area, who will be offering a new prompt and a new approach to ekphrastic writing (writing inspired by visual art). Bring your own notebook and pencil or computer and leave with the beginning of a newly written piece.

Co-sponsored by Iowa City Poetry. Teen and adult writers in all genres are welcome.

Write at the Stanley meets every fourth...

Elizabeth Zuba & Farnoosh Fathi - "Where is Everyone!" and "Granny Cloud" promotional image

Elizabeth Zuba & Farnoosh Fathi - "Where is Everyone!" and "Granny Cloud"

Monday, April 27, 2026 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Prairie Lights Books
Elizabeth Zuba will read from her new poetry collection, Where Is Everyone!, and Farnoosh Fathi will read from her poetry collection Granny Cloud. Described as "an urgent cry of revolutionary spirit, but...also a cry bedecked with extinction and nearly possessed by wonder," Where Is Everyone! is praised by Farnoosh Fathi as: "poems [that] not only proclaim and prove this augury, but they help us to feel how the work of one poem is part of an already immanently collective activity, created by the 'autonaut[s] of every species and cosmic order.' That she can translate scientific perception into poetic companionship so breathlessly, with such a frank ecstasy and generous humility, gives me the inspiration and loving intensity I need to get with and what and where everyone really is." Meanwhile, Fathi's Granny Cloud is described by Janani Ambikapathy of the Poetry Foundation as "electrifying syntax" and praises the collection as "driven by a kind of entrancement: Fathi is so acutely attuned to everything she encounters—things and animals as much as abstract nouns, and particles of language—that she dresses each thing in a surfeit of attention."

Just recently...

Live from Prairie Lights | Margaret LeMay - 'sample.spring'  promotional image

Live from Prairie Lights | Margaret LeMay - 'sample.spring'

Sunday, April 19, 2026 4:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Margaret LeMay will read from her new poetry chapbook, sample.spring. Prairie Lights owner and poet Jan Weissmiller says this about sample.spring:

"In these spare, acutely observant poems, Margaret LeMay describes the stress of living in a world so endangered it is hard to explain to a child. Her internal dialogue, with its syntax of sadness, is perfectly placed. The way the natural world enters this dialogue is imagistically exact and exacting. The poet’s perception expresses an existential...

Robyn Schiff Reading and Q&A promotional image

Robyn Schiff Reading and Q&A

Saturday, April 18, 2026 4:00pm
Dey House

Join us for a reading and Q & A with Robyn Schiff:

Robyn Schiff is the author of the poetry collections Information Desk: An Epic; Worth; Revolver; and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Schiff’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. The recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, she is a professor at the University of Chicago and coedits Canarium...

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