University of Iowa English alumnus Ned Stuckey-French and Carl Klaus, founder of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, will read from Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, the book they co-edited for the UI Press, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 25, Prairie Lights in Prairie Lights Books.

The free event will be streamed live on the UI’s Virtual Writing University website.

Essayists on the Essay is the first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay.

The essayists include Montaigne, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, José Ortega y Gasset, Virginia Woolf, Theodor Adorno, Aldous Huxley, E. B. White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Scott Russell Sanders, Philip Lopate, Susan Sontag, Vivian Gornick, UI nonfiction faculty member John D’Agata, Ander Monson, and John Bresland.

Robert Atwan, the series editor of Best American Essays, commented, “Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French are among the finest commentators of the genre today. Their presentation of the material will be extremely valuable to us all—we teachers, writers, critics, and educated readers who remain devoted to furthering the study of the essay.”

Klaus, who is now a UI professor emeritus, is co-editor of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction from the UI Press. His widely praised nonfiction includes The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay as well as My Vegetable Love and its companion, Weathering Winter.

Stuckey-French, a faculty member at Florida State University, is the author of The American Essay in the American Century, a study of personal essays, magazine culture and class construction. His reviews and critical work have appeared in many journals. He is the book review editor for Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

His articles and essays have appeared in journals and magazines such as In These Times, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Walking Magazine, culturefront, Pinch, Guernica, and American Literature, and have been listed three times among the notable essays of the year in Best American Essays.

Stuckey-French has been in the national news recently as a leader in the attempts to reverse the University of Missouri’s decision to close the University of Missouri Press.

For accommodations at the live event, contact jan@prairielights.com. The English Department, which includes the Nonfiction Writing Program, is part of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.