Things to do in Iowa City

New York Times best selling author Ayana Mathis will be reading from her debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), at the Englert Theater on Feb. 25. The reading will be presented by Prairie Lights Books. Mathis is currently a visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she graduated with an MFA in Fiction. Her novel has received wide recognition, first as the winner of the 2012 Michener Copernicus Fellowship and then as the second book selection by Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called the novel “astonishingly powerful,” and echoed Oprah’s comparison of Mathis’s work to that of Toni Morrison.