Events Calendar

National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award-winner Sarah Braunstein will read from her new novel, Bad Animals. She will be joined in conversation by author Rachel Yoder. "Bad Animals opens with a delightful shock, and then the fun begins. With deft, sly, loving insight into the human animal and its genius for self-deception, Braunstein ratchets up and sustains this extraordinary novel's elegance and complexity until the last, beautiful sentence." —Kate Christensen

Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Fiction. The novel was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick of the Month. Braunstein's short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and in other publications. She co-wrote a play, String Theory: Three Greek Myths Woven Together, with Michael Barakiva and Amy Boyce Holtcamp. For several years she served on the National Selection Panel of the National Young Arts Foundation. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Colby College.

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch, her debut novel released in July 2021. Selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021, Nightbitch has gone on to be named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture and recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and shortlist for the McKitterick Prize. To date, Nightbitch has been translated into 13 languages. Yoder is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. A native of eastern Ohio, she now lives in Iowa City.

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