Iowa Writers' Workshop alum C. Mallon will read from her debut novel, Dogs, and will be joined in conversation by visiting Iowa Writers' Workshop instructor, Kevin Brockmeier. Described by Simon and Schuster as a story that "traces the fallout of one catastrophic night in the lives of five high school wrestlers, asking what can survive in the blast radius of latent trauma and violence," Dogs is praised by Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead, as "equal parts scouring and clarifying, the kind of writing that exposes the wounds in order to irrigate them," while Daniel Magariel, author of One of the Boys praises Dogs as "a raw, beautiful excavation of the wounds blown open by the betrayal of life's most sacred relationships."
C. Mallon is a graduate of the University of East Anglia and holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a writer of literary fiction, working with a heavy emphasis on themes of masculinity, violence, and the shrapnel radius of serious trauma across communities and generations. She is also a 2024 fellow of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center (fawc.org).
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky, The View from the Seventh Layer, and The Ghost Variations; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised. You can find him online at kevinbrockmeier.com.
You may also like the following events from Prairie Lights Bookstore:
Also check out other
Arts events in Iowa City,
Literary Art events in Iowa City.