Events Calendar

Please join us on Zoom for a special reading and conversation with best-selling author Mary Pipher and Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program Professor Emerita Patricia Foster, who will talk about A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence. To attend this virtual event, REGISTER HERE.

In this luminous memoir in essays, Mary Pipher—as she did in her New York Times bestseller Women Rowing North—taps into a cultural moment, to offer wisdom, hope, and insight into loss and change. Drawing from her own experiences and expertise as a psychologist specializing in women, trauma, and the effect of our culture on our mental health, she looks inward in A Life in Light to what shaped her as a woman, what she’s learned about how to balance despair with joy, and what coping skills she has developed. Pipher reminds us that there is a silver thread of resilience that flows through all of life, and that despite our despair, the light will return.

Mary Pipher is a psychologist who has earned the title of “cultural therapist” for her generation. She is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Reviving Ophelia, The Shelter of Each Other, Another Country and most recently, Women Rowing North. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Pipher will be joined by Patricia Foster, who brings to the conversation over 30 years of study and experience in writing and women's literature. She is the author of All the Lost Girls, Girl from Soldier Creek, Just Beneath My Skin, and Written in the Sky. Editor of Minding the Body and Sister to Sister; and co-editor of The Healing Circle; her short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. She taught for the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for 25 years, and has taught workshops in Florence, Italy; Barcelona, Spain; and Prague, Czech Republic, and in Montpellier, France. She lives in Iowa City.