This special 7:30 p.m. Mission Creek Festival event celebrates something you may not know some of your favorite authors are interested in: gaming. Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, published by Graywolf, celebrates this sophisticated medium and considers its lasting impact on our culture and ourselves. “[Video games] raise profound questions for the humans who find themselves enraptured by these digital puzzles, adventures, and battles lighting up their computers, televisions, or handheld consoles. . . . These questions and others receive sharp attention in essays by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Alexander Chee, Larissa Pham, and other authors who boldly own and astutely analyze their engagement with video games and their intersections with family, friendship, love, and other heady subjects.”―Poets & Writers Magazine

Critical Hits editors Carmen Maria Machado and J Robert Lennon, along with contributor Larissa Pham, will read from and talk about this fun and fascinating new anthology!

J Robert Lennon is the author of three story collections and 10 novels, including Broken River, Castle, Subdivision, and the forthcoming Hard Girls.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the best-selling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning-short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in upstate New York. She writes fiction, essays, and criticism and is the author of Fantasian, a novella, and the essay collection Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

This Mission Creek Festival event is free and open to the public!

To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.