Brett Eugene Ralph will read from his first collection of poems, Black Sabbatical, published by Sarabande Press. Brett Eugene Ralph grew up in Louisville Kentucky playing football and singing in punk rock bands.

What happens when a professor at a small college decides to defend the school’s iconic but politically incorrect sports mascot? What happens when he falls into the middle of a feud between two famous writers? What happens when the college’s reform-minded president decides to use the professor as “the chicken who’s killed to frighten the monkeys”? And what happens when a fashionable filmmaker decides to make a movie about the whole to-do?

Iowa author, Joe Blair, will read from By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir of Disaster and Love. After his first cross-country motorcycle trip, Joe Blair believed he had discovered his true calling.

Wells Tower, who took the literary world by storm last year, will read from his stunning collection of stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Exploring men down on their luck in their roles as fathers, brothers, stepfathers, husbands and sons, these stories are filled with both wry humor and primal rage. 'Wells Tower is a blindingly brilliant writer who does more than raise the bar for debut fiction: he hurls it into space.” --Ben Marcus

MacArthur Fellow, YiYun Li will read from her second collection of short stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, gives us exquisite fiction filled with suspense, depth and beauty, in which history, politics, and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals worlds strange and familiar, and cultures both traditional and modern.

Iowa City native Tim Johnston returns to Prairie Lights to read from Irish Girl, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Tim Johnston received an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and then worked as a carpenter. His first book, Never So Green, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The tightly coiled stories in Irish Girl venture deeply into the consciousness of Midwesterners to unearth old tensions and buried...

Leslie Jamison will read from The Gin Closet, a debut novel about broken families, mended trust, poverty, privilege, and the inescapable brutality of love. The story is told through the voices of a young woman and her alcoholic aunt. Leslie Jamison has been previously published in Best New American Voices 2008. She holds degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently lives in Iowa City.

Kevin Gonzalez will read from his first collection of poetry, Cultural Studies. Kevin Gonzalez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He holds degrees from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His poems and stories have appeared in Playboy, The Progressive, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry and McSweeneys. “With expansive grandeur and Whitmanian proclamations, Cultural Studies rides a cultural mélange with a channel-surfer’s brio, a surrealist’s hell-bent imagination...

Max Allan Collins will read from The Big Bang, his most recent collaboration with the late Mickey Spillane. Mickey Spillane, the creator of the iconic detective Mike Hammer, died in 2006. Max Allan Collins, his long-time collaborator, was originally shown the unfinished manuscript of The Big Bang in 1982. He and Spillane were able to talk about the novel in detail, including plans for the ending, before Spillane's death. The result is a remarkable novel set in the midst of the swinging...

In 2007 Joshua Ferris’ first novel, Then We Came to the End, was one of the most widely acclaimed books of the year. It made just about everybody’s top ten list and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In it, Ferris invented a style (first person plural all the way) and wedged fiction into the workplace as tightly as it could be wedged. It was also hysterically funny.

Writers’ Workshop graduate Jerald Walker reads from Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption.

Jenna Blum will read from Stormchasers, a novel she researched by chasing tornadoes for five years with a stormchasing company called Tempest Tours. It centers around twins Karena and Charles who share an unbreakable bond and a devastating secret. Twenty years ago,18-year-old Charles, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and his sister were out stormchasing when they collided with a motorcyclist. The two swore to each other they wouldn't report the deadly incident to authorities. In the years...

Jeff Biggers will read from Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. Journalist Biggers tallies up the human cost of more than two centuries of coal mining in southern Illinois as he excavates the history beneath the homestead at Eagle Creek where his family lived for eight generations. The displacement of the indigenous Shawnee, the hidden legacy of slavery, and the intense conflicts between miners and their bosses all come sharply into focus in the personal and...

Frank Meeink will read from Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, a raw telling of his descent into America’s Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over drugs and hatred. A violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate. By age 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 was doing hard time. The story of Meeink’s downfall and redemption has the power to open hearts and change lives.

Diana Joseph will read from I’m Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog. Funny, fearless and warmhearted, her book is a portrait of a woman in all her endless complexities and contradictions, and the people she has come to love in spite of – or rather because of – theirs. “Somehow hard-boiled and warm-hearted all at once, Joseph’s stories have an unflinching honesty and a wry appreciation for the absurdities...

David Zimmerman will read from The Sandbox, a classic story of a decent man trying to do right under impossible circumstances.

Poet, novelist and essayist, David Huddle will read from Glory River, his most recent volume of poems. In a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening, the poems of Glory River pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live. Huddle has taught for more than 30 years at the University of Vermont’s prestigious writing program, and has recently been appointed Visiting Distinguished...

Carol Sklenicka will read from Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. Two decades after his death, this definitive biography tells the story of Carver’s uncanny ambition, legendary life and enduring work.

Brett Eugene Ralph will read from his first collection of poems, Black Sabbatical, published by Sarabande Press.

Alan Bradley will read from The Weed That Strings The Hangman’s Bag, his endlessly entertaining follow-up to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This utterly beguiling mystery stars one of fiction’s most remarkable sleuths: Flavia de Luce, a dangerously brilliant eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders. It is the summer of 1950, and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, Flavia de Luce is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events. But her intrigue...

Aimee Bender will read from her new novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attiontion, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift — a gift that's really a devastating curse.