Events Calendar

At Noon, The Iowa City Book Festival Presents Writers’ Workshop Faculty member Elizabeth Willis, who will read from Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. This work has been Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.

"In this vast and masterful book, Elizabeth Willis lays personal claim to the terror unleashed by John Winthrop’s prophecy ‘wee shall be made a story.’ And it’s the wild bravery of that personal claim that sets Willis apart and moves Liontaming into a US poetic counter-tradition of writing collective memory made by Gayl Jones, Joan Retallack, Muriel Rukeyser, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others. I don’t think there is a name for it, for the self-imperiling impulse to remember not to regenerate through violence. Willis’s intricate text is a family story, is a nest, is a daybook of images in motion as settlers, as pioneers. Extensive archival work thickens her writing, but make no mistake: Willis has given us a gorgeous, mournful and wildly intelligent poem.” ― Simone White

Willis’s other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence. She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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