“I mean, we might as well address the dog in the room,” chuckled Andrew Sherburne, the co-founder of Iowa City’s nonprofit cinema FilmScene. Sherburne and programming director Ben Delgado eagerly await Oct. 17, the opening night of the Refocus Film Festival and the Iowa City premiere of Nightbitch, adapted from Iowa City author Rachel Yoder’s […]
Iowa City Book Festival
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‘My films are my voyage, and writing is home’: Werner Herzog proselytizes his love of poetry, reading and the U.S. Heartland after receiving local film award
More than 700 people filled Iowa City’s Englert Theatre on Sunday night to hear the legendary voice of Werner Herzog. The German filmmaker and author was greeted with nearly a minute of applause, and received two standing ovations before the night was out. The event concluded both FilmScene’s second Refocus Film Festival and the 15th […]
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Mindy Mejia’s latest thriller is inspired by her own Iowa-based trauma
Mindy Mejia was only at the University of Iowa for one year of undergrad, but she still remembers the storm. “During one trip back [to UI] to visit friends, I actually got caught in an ice storm, so very similar to the setting of the book,” the Minnesota-based author recalled. “Everything was shut down, only […]
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University of Iowa Translation Workshop celebrates 60 years of supporting the art and labor of translation
The Masters of Fine Arts in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa is one of only a handful of similar programs worldwide. A key facet, the 60-year-old UI Translation Workshop, predates the MFA program by a decade. Boasting the title of “the country’s first translation workshop in a university setting,” it took shape during […]
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A community read of ‘Les Miserables’ drives a thread of ICBF programming
Anna Barker hadn’t even made it into her chair in the patio seating area of the downtown Java House for our interview before she posed a question. “Thirteen hundred pages in 92 days? Who does that?” The answer, of course, is that she does — and so do her hundreds of reading companions. The 1,300 […]
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Crooked Path Theatre to bring its off-beat productions to Prairie Lights, The James this fall
It can be hard to keep up with the absolute explosion of theater happening in the Corridor. Talent and passion keep sprouting in this fertile Iowan soil, and “so much theater” is an incredibly delightful (and coveted) problem for any town to have. Not new, but positively blossoming this fall is one company you may […]
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FilmScene’s long-awaited ReFocus Film Festival is ‘tailormade for a City of Literature’
Iowa City’s literary history casts a long shadow. It’s the first UNESCO City of Literature in the country, home to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But next month, Iowa City will enter the film festival world with FilmScene’s long-awaited ReFocus Film Festival, an event dedicated to the relationship between literature and film. Andrew Sherburne, executive director […]
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The 13th Iowa City Book Festival includes Bob Woodward, a celebration of Dostoevsky and more
Literature lovers should get ready to indulge in a week-long celebration of authors, readers and writing, as the 13th annual Iowa City Book Festival (ICBF) kicks off. This year’s festival runs from Monday, Oct. 18 to Sunday, Oct. 24, and unlike last year’s festival, which was entirely virtual because of the pandemic, it will have […]
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‘We were meant to suffer together’: Iowa City to celebrate Dostoevsky’s 200th through his last, epic novel
On March 13, 2020, five days after the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in Iowa, Anna Barker texted UNESCO City of Literature director John Kenyon, with her trademark triple-exclamatory enthusiasm: “Call me call me call me!!! I have an AMAZING quarantine book idea!!!” Barker, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Iowa with a […]
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Can’t-miss events at the 2019 Iowa City Book Festival
The Iowa City Book Festival has kicked off, and the celebration of writers and readers is just be amping up. Here are six of the many authors on this year’s schedule worthy of your attention.
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The 10th annual Iowa City Book Festival is underway!
Literature, of course, has never been bound to books — but books have become increasingly unbound through various iterations and innovations.
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‘Education is a currency for survival’: Jon Kerstetter on politics, war and recovery
Iowa City Book Festival Presents: Jon Kerstetter Prairie Lights — Saturday, Oct. 13 at 1 p.m. In July of 2003, Jon Kerstetter, a U.S. Army National Guard combat physician, found himself in a rather bizarre situation. Despite a lack of training or certification in forensic pathology, Kerstetter was commanded to identify the dead bodies of […]
