Short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg, a former visiting faculty member in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will return as a guest of the workshop to present a free reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Dey House.

Deborah Eisenberg

Eisenberg, who teaches at Columbia University, has written four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. The four collections were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

She has also written a play, Pastorale, which was produced at Second Stage in New York, and she has written for periodicals including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Tin House, and the Yale Review.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Eisenberg has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur “genius grant,” the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and four O. Henry Awards.

Eisenberg is consistently acclaimed for her strong portrayal of characters dealing with the confusion of modern life. She has written about subjects including U.S. involvement in the governmental affairs of Latin America, the influence the Holocaust exerts on our consciousness, and the ways in which we, as adults, consistently ignore and misunderstand the fragility and complexity of our children.

The Rea Award jurors commented, "At once expansive and compressed, generously compassionate and surgically precise, elegant and searing, Deborah Eisenberg's luminous fiction peels back the carapace of the visible world to reveal the secret layers and levels, the wonders of the parallel universe that underlie ordinary reality.

“Embracing poetry and philosophy, the grittiest political realities and the most exalted mysteries of the human heart, the grief of childhood and the consolations of retrospect, her collections… remind us (in case we need reminding) that the short story can be a capacious, as dense, as profound, and rewarding as the longest and most ambitious novel."

Read a profile of Eisenberg in The Millions and an interview at The Days of Yore.

The Writers’ Workshop is a unit of the UI Graduate College and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For accommodations at the reading, contact the workshop at 319-335-0416. For a UI arts calendar and event details, visit the new Arts Iowa website.