R. Tripp Evans will read from his new book, Grant Wood: A Life. The book, which is garnering much praise and attention, reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him.
Live from Prairie Lights – show 11 Brett Eugene Ralph
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.
Live from Prairie Lights show 22 Joe Blair
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.
Live from Prairie Lights show 21 Joe Dobrian
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?
Live from Prairie Lights – Wells Tower
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