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THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED.

The Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program presents poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic Lew Hyde, who will talk about his work. Hyde is currently the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Writer, and his reading at Prairie Lights is part of the Krause Series in Contemporary Nonfiction.

Lewis Hyde is most famously the author of the bestselling book The Gift, which illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. He is also author of Trickster Makes This World, Common as Air, and most recently, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.

"In A Primer for Forgetting, that bold yet gentle intellectual adventurer, Lewis Hyde, harrows the bottomless mysteries of memory and forgetting, trauma and recovery, amnesia and commemoration, reconciliation and forgiveness. If this deep, poignant, soulful, inquisitive, gently tragic and disarmingly erudite book were nine times longer, I would still have felt sad when I realized it was coming to an end." —Michael Chabon

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde taught creative writing and American literature for many years at Kenyon College. Now retired, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a trustee of the MacDowell Colony and a founding director of the Creative Capital Foundation.

This reading is sponsored by The Nonfiction Writing Program, the Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Provost’s Office, Prairie Lights Books, and the Kyle J. and Sharon Krause Family Foundation.