Poetry will take the lead in free readings at 7 p.m. July 10-12, and live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

• Poets Ross Gay and Chris Mattingly will read from their work on Tuesday, July 10.

Camille Dungy

• Poet and Iowa City native Camille Dungy and Ossetian fiction writer Alan Cherchesov, a 2010 resident of the UI International Writing Program, will read from their work on Wednesday, July 11.

• And Alexandra Fuller will read from her new memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, on Thursday, July 12.

Gay, a faculty member at Indiana University, is the author of two collections of poems, Bringing the Shovel Down and Against Which. Mattingly is the author of the chapbooks Ad Hoc and A Light for Your Beacon. His poems have most recently appeared in the Louisville Review, Still, Lumberyard, and Forklift, Ohio.

Dungy, a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee, is author of the poetry collections, Smith Blue, winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize; Suck on the Marrow; and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Cave Canem, the Dana Award, and a Bread Loaf residency.

She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade.

Cherchesov is the author of two novels and a number of short stories. His novels were short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, and Wreath on the Grave of the Wind was awarded the prize of the Russian Academy of Critics in 2001. Read an IWP interview on the Writing University website.

Fuller’s book is a story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, and an intimate exploration of Fuller’s parents in Africa. She was born in England in 1969 and in 1972 she moved with her family to a farm in Rhodesia. After that country’s civil war in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia. Her Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2002, and a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award.

For accommodations at the live events, contact jan@prairielights.com.