Eileen Pollack and Jen Percy will read from their work at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 3, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City as part of the Mission Creek Festival. The reading also will be streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

A graduate of Yale University with a Bachelor of Science in physics, Pollack later earned a Master of Fine Arts from the UI Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Her second novel, Breaking and Entering, was published in January 2012 by Four Way Books and soon after was awarded the 2012 Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection. The novel follows the experiences of Louise and Richard Shapiro, who, with their young daughter, Molly, move from ultra-liberal Marin County, Calif., to a quaint, rural town in the Midwest, only to discover that most of their neighbors belong to the Michigan Militia.

Percy was formerly in the UI Nonfiction Writing Program; she is now in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her nonfiction book Demon Camp is forthcoming from Scribner. The book begins with the story of a charismatic man—a Special Ops soldier who believes his post-traumatic stress disorder is caused by demons—but becomes about the author’s obsession with the strange and mesmerizing world she encounters.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a graduate program in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.