Archive

SHELTER HOUSE READING

May 23, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Please join us for the third annual Shelter House Reading, where three writers will read from the second publication of their anthology, Of the Folk: Ordinary Lines Extraordinary Portraits.

This year’s issue Of the Folk features: a meeting with estranged father at the Laundromat . . . the woman who carried a butcher’s knife inside her bra . . . the jutted rock that peaks out the ocean floor . . . an unlikely friendship . . . a personal exploration of inheritance . . . the dawn of a revolution . . .

Prairie Lights will donate 10% of the day’s sales to Shelter House, Iowa City. If you are unable to attend, you can still support Shelter House by shopping at Prairie Lights on May 23rd.
DEWITT HENRY

May 21, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Dewitt Henry will read from his chapbook Visions of a Wayne Childhood. Visions of a Wayne Childhood is 21 brief sketches about growing up on the Philadelphia Main Line during the 1940s and 50s. Henry writes: “Contrary to the saying that you can’t go home again, at a lifetime’s distance, I believe that you can and should, and perhaps must, in memory and imagination. More than an exercise in nostalgia, I believe this to be an affirmation of distance and growth.” Or, as Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories, put it: “DeWitt Henry ushers his readers to better understandings of their own histories.”

Dewitt Henry is the author of Sweet Dreams: a Family History, Safe Suicide: Essays, Narratives, and Mediations, and The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, which won the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. He has edited numerous anthologies and is the founding editor of Ploughshares. He teaches at Emerson College.
RUS BRADBURD

May 20, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Rus Bradburd will read from Make It, Take It, an inventive novel that sneaks the reader past the press conferences, locker rooms, and huddles of college basketball.

Without judgment or sentimentality, Rus Bradburd lays bare the web of conflicts between players and coaches, blacks and whites, revealing the complex humanity of a team's inner circle. "Rus Bradburd has given us an original novel about college basketball that is compelling, unsettling, yet downright funny and sad at the same time. Make It, Take It is even better than his incisive non-fiction — and, frankly, that's just not fair." — Dave Zirin

Rus Bradburd is the author of the controversial Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson and a memoir, Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops. He spent fourteen years as a college basketball coach, working for legends Don Haskins and Lou Henson. A regular contributor to SLAM Magazine, his essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Houston Chronicle, and Chicago's Southtown Star. He is married to poet Connie Voisine. They live in New Mexico and Chicago, Illinois.
RUSSELL JAFFE

May 17, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Local author Russell Jaffe will read from his new book of poetry, This Super Doom I Aver. The Lit Show’s Ben Mauk describes Jaffe as “an artist, poet, teacher, event organizer, and all-around participator . . . His work is riotously fun, doggedly unpretentious, and [________].”

Jaffe is the founder and editor of the small press Strange Cage. His work is forthcoming in [PANK] and H_NGM_N. He holds an MFA from Columbia College, and currently teaches English and Continuing Education Department poetry courses at Kirkwood Community College.
DAVID RHODES

May 16, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

David Rhodes, whose book Driftless was the "All Iowa Reads" selection for 2010, returns to read from his new novel, Jewelweed. As a young man, David Rhodes worked in fields, hospitals, and factories across Iowa. After receiving an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he published three acclaimed novels: The Last Fair Deal Going Down, The Easter House, and Rock Island Line. When David Rhodes burst onto the American literary scene in the seventies, he was hailed as a "brilliant visionary" (John Gardner), and compared to Sherwood Anderson. With Driftless, the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years" (Alan Cheuse), Rhodes brought Words, Wisconsin, to life in a way that resonated with readers across America. Now, with Jewelweed, this beloved author returns to the Driftless Region, and introduces a cast of characters who all find themselves struggling to find a new sense of belonging in the present moment--sometimes with the help of peach preserves or mashed potato pie.

"With Jewelweed, David Rhodes has once more produced a moving, deeply thoughtful novel, of poor people doing difficult things, often against their best interests. He is the same writer, maybe better, as the author of Driftless." — Paul Ingram
bpNICHOL POETRY

May 15, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

We will have a launch event and book signing in Prairie Lights Café for a book of variations: love—zygal—art facts, a collection of the Canadian poet bpNichol.

Barrie Phillip Nichol was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1944 and died in Toronto, Ontario in 1988. He often went by his lower-case initials and last name, with no spaces (bpNichol). He became widely known for his concrete poetry while living there in the 1960s. Nichol worked in a wide variety of other genres, including musical theatre, children's books, collage/assemblage, pamphlets, spoken word, computer texts, fiction, and television. For having such a brief lifespan, Nichol produced a highly prolific volume of work. However, it was often ephemeral, such as performance.

The book is edited by Stephen Voyce who teaches in The English Department at The University of Iowa. He will be joined by Dee Morris, Robyn Schiff, Stephen Sturgeon and Robert Fernandez who will read from the poems.

"No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent." — Michael Ondaatje
PAUL'S BOOK CLUB

May 14, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Wright Morris was one of the great American novelists of the mid-twentieth century and, along with Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner, one of the great writers of the American Midwestern experience. Even though most of his books are forgotten now he won two National Book Awards, one for Plains Song and the other for The Field of Vision. He wrote more than 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Home Place, a fiction/documentary illustrated with his own photographs.

“Nothing happens to a man overnight but sometimes what has been happening for years, every day of his life, happens suddenly. You open a door or maybe you close it, and the thing is done. It happens. That’s the important thing. I watched the old man in his nautical hat cross the yard like one on his harrows, the parts, unhinged, the joints creaking under a mat of yellow grass. He stopped near the planter to suck on his pipe, tap the bowl on the seat. On the spring handle of the gear was a white cotton glove, with the fingers spread, thrust up in the air like the gloved hand of a traffic cop. The leather palm was gone, worn away, but the crabbed fingers and the reinforced stitching, the bib pattern, was still there.
REBECCA KANNER

May 13, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Rebecca Kanner will read from her new novel Sinners and the Sea: the Untold Story of Noah’s Wife. In the spirit of Anita Diamant, this ambitious and unforgettable novel blends biblical tradition, mythology, and the inimitable strength of women. "Sinners and the Sea is a haunting, beautifully written story of struggle and redemption told through the eyes of the Biblical prophet Noah's wife. Kanner leads us out of the valley of the shadow of death into a new world of promise and hope. Sinners is a profoundly moving tale, thrilling and fast-paced, and one of the best books I have read in a very long time." — Sherry Jones

Rebecca Kanner's writing has won an Associated Writing Programs Award and a Loft Mentorship Award. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review and The Cincinnati Review, and she teaches writing at The Loft in Minneapolis.
CHRISTIAN SCHOON

May 11, 2013 - 5:00pm

Prairie Lights

Christian Schoon will read from his new young adult/fantasy novel, Zenn Scarlett, featuring, Zenn Scarlett, a bright, determined 17-year-old girl training to become an exoveterinarian, specializing in the treatment of exotic alien life forms.

“All future veterinarians will want to read Zenn Scarlett and her adventures with veterinary medicine on alien animals.” —Temple Grandin

"Mars, monsters, and mysteries: Zenn Scarlett is a thoughtful and thrilling science fiction adventure that's perfect for readers who think they've seen it all! It's refreshing to encounter an original young adult story that defies expectations, and the breathtaking conclusion will leave you desperate for more." — E.C. Myers, author of Fair Coin and Quantum Coin

Christian Schoon began his writing career as an in-house marketing writer at the Walt Disney Company, followed by a stint as a freelance writer working for various film and video studios in Los Angeles. After moving back to the Midwest, he bought a farm, started volunteering with a group that rescues abused/neglected horses and another group helping to re-hab wildlife: black bears, cougars, coyotes, raccoons, and assorted other animals. His animal welfare work, combined with his life-long sci-fi geekery inspired Christian to write Zenn Scarlett, his first book. A portion of the proceeds of sales from this event will go to animal charities. He lives in Shueyville.
ROBIN HEMLEY

May 10, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Robin Hemley will read from Nola, a Memoir of Faith, Art and Madness, which reconstructs the life of his schizophrenic sister, who died at the age of 25.

"Nola is really the biography of a family, by a writer who understands the complex inter-relationships between people who love each other helplessly. Robin Hemley investigates the shifting space that so often separates spiritual quest from insanity, divides a healthy search for the light from a dangerous staring at the sun. And finally, this is a writer's story, painful, edgy, honest, and humble before mysteries even the best observer and family archivist will never understand." — Rosellen Brown

An eloquent elegy to his sister (possibly a suicide and almost certainly a saint), Robin Hemley's "Nola is the extraordinarily moving story of a rational man's education into mystery and magic." — David Shields

Robin Hemley is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Do-Over! (Little, Brown and Company, 2009). He has won many awards for his prose, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The Chicago Tribune, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives in Iowa City with his family.