Archive

Live From Prairie Lights

“Live from Prairie Lights” is an internationally known readings series, which features some of the best up-and-coming and well-established authors & poets from all over the globe. Presented before a live audience and streamed over the world wide web, this long running series brings the spoken word from the bookstore to the masses.
Most readings begin @ 7:00 p.m. Arrive early to assure yourself a seat.

The Writing University live streams many of our readings here.

The Live from Prairie Lights audio archive is available here.

Iowa City PATV has a video archive of readings located here.

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May 16, 2012 - 7:00pm
Iowa City Public Library
Geraldine Brooks
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Pulitzer-Prize-Winning novelist, Geraldine Brooks will be here to read from her New York Times' Bestselling novel, Caleb's Crossing, which has just been released in paperback. The novel features Bethia Mayfield, a restless and curious young woman growing up in Martha's vineyard in the 1660s amid a small band of pioneering English Puritans. At age twelve, she meets Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's father is a Calvinist minister who seeks to convert the native Wampanoag, and Caleb becomes a prize in the contest between old ways and new, eventually becoming the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. Inspired by a true story and narrated by the irresistible Bethia, Caleb's Crossing brilliantly captures the triumphs and turmoil of two brave, openhearted spirits who risk everything in a search for knowledge at a time of superstition and ignorance.

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.

Brooks married author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup, France, in 1984. They have two sons – Nathaniel and Bizuayehu – and two dogs. They divide their time between homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Sydney, Australia.

 

May 17, 2012 - 7:00pm
Prairie Lights
PAUL' BOOK CLUB
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Join us for the May edition of Paul's Book Club. This month the book club selection is Jim Crace's The Gift of Stones. This is the second novel by the British Crace and it is set in a Stone Age village, seemingly distant from our own time and yet so like it as to be almost frightening. It is a world confronting change brought on by the advent of bronze, a technological development not unlike the coming of the computer. The villagers, once secure and flourishing, suddenly find their craft—and themselves—obsolete. As the fabulist tale unwinds, Crace looks into the role of the artist in society—here, a storyteller--considering both the impact and limits of imagination in guiding us toward new horizons. Could Paul have chosen this because of the e-book revolution? Come to the book club and find out.

 

May 22, 2012 - 7:00pm
Prairie Lights
CHARLES READ
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Charles Read, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics at The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, will read from his memoir, This Navy Doctor Came Ashore. Dr. Read entered the Royal Canadian Navy in 1943 and worked for three years as a flight surgeon. When the war was winding down, he realized that his career as a flight surgeon was also over. But he remembered how much he had enjoyed the three weeks he spent in Charlottetown when he relieved the medical officer at HMCS Queen Charlotte.

This city of 20,000, in which this landship was ‘moored’, was much to his liking partly because he had grown up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, just across the Northumberland Strait, where he thought the culture was very similar. He also knew that as the only medical officer there would be independence, significant responsibility and virtual freedom from naval protocol and politics. One couldn’t ask for more. But this was during prohibition on the Island and little did he know that a great deal of his time would be spent writing "prescriptions" for alcohol so that the officers could be allowed to drink. Nor did he know that because of the lack of family physicians on the Island, he would be asked to open a general practice in a rural area of the province. For a flight surgeon who had little experience in family medicine, this would be a whole new adventure. This book chronicles some of the noteworthy events of the time he spent as a country doctor.

Charles Read was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia and went on to medical school at McGill University. He was a Surgeon Lieutenant for the Royal Canadian Navy and after the war finished his medical training in Montreal and at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University. He has been in Iowa City since 1954.

 

May 24, 2012 - 7:00pm
Prairie Lights
KEVIN WILSON
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Kevin Wilson will be hear to read from his New York TImes' Bestselling novel, The Family Fang, which has just been released in paper. Wilson's bizarre, mirthful debut novel traces the genesis of the Fang family, art world darlings who make "strange and memorable things." That is, they instigate and record public chaos. Their children called it mischief, Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.

"The Family Fang is a comedy, a tragedy, and a tour-de-force examination of what it means to make art and survive your family. Like everything else Kevin Wilson does, I have never seen anything like it before. The best single word description would be: brilliant." —Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto.

Kevin Wilson is also the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. Wilson has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South.

 

May 26, 2012 - 5:00pm
Prairie Lights
ZACH WAHLS
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By popular demand, Zach Wahls will be back to read from and discuss his now best-selling book, My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family. This time his moms, Terry and Jackie, will accompany him. He will be returning from a whirlwind national book tour that included an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. If you missed that, you can see it here online: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-30-2012/zach-wahls.  In any case, join us for another amazing event.

 

May 31, 2012 - 7:00pm
Prairie Lights
IOWA CITY SHELTER HOUSE COMMUNITY STORIES WRITERS' WORKSHOP

In this second of what will be an annual event, writers from the Community Stories Writing Workshop at The Iowa City Shelter House will read from a collection of their work. Members will be reading from a newly collected edition of their work that Prairie Lights is publishing. Please join us to hear The Shelter House Community Writers share their remarkable stories. Prairie Lights will donate 10% of all sales from May 31st to The Shelter House. Even if you are unable to attend the reading, you can support The Shelter House by shopping at Prairie Lights on May 31st.