Elizabeth Zuba & Farnoosh Fathi

Elizabeth Zuba will read from her new poetry collection, Where Is Everyone!, and Farnoosh Fathi will read from her poetry collection Granny Cloud. Described as “an urgent cry of revolutionary spirit, but…also a cry bedecked with extinction and nearly possessed by wonder,” Where Is Everyone! is praised by Farnoosh Fathi as: “poems not only proclaim and prove this augury, but they help us to feel how the work of one poem is part of an already immanently collective activity, created by the ‘autonaut of every species and cosmic order.’ That she can translate scientific perception into poetic companionship so breathlessly, with such a frank ecstasy and generous humility, gives me the inspiration and loving intensity I need to get with and what and where everyone really is.” Meanwhile, Fathi’s Granny Cloud is described by Janani Ambikapathy of the Poetry Foundation as “electrifying syntax” and praises the collection as “driven by a kind of entrancement: Fathi is so acutely attuned to everything she encounters—things and animals as much as abstract nouns, and particles of language—that she dresses each thing in a surfeit of attention.” Elizabeth Zuba is the author of three books of poetry—Where Is Everyone! (Conduit), which won the 2024 Minds on Fire Book Prize, Decoherent the Wingèd (SplitLevel), and the chapbook May Double as a Whistle (The Song Cave)—and the translator of multiple artists’ books from the Spanish, French, and Portuguese, including several by Marcel Broodthaers. She was the recipient of the 2016 French Voices Award for translation, and her books on Ray Johnson, Not Nothing (Siglio) and Frog Pond Splash (Siglio), were selected as NYT Best Art Books of the Year in 2014 and 2020. She lives in New York. Farnoosh Fathi is a Spring 2026 Visiting Assistant Professor of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of the poetry collections Great Guns (Canarium 2013) and Granny Cloud (NYRB Poets 2024), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets 2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York. Date:Mon, 4/27/2026 Time:7:00pm – 8:00pm Place: Prairie Lights Books 15 S Dubuque St Iowa City, IA 52240