Writer, translator, and academic Laird Hunt will read from Kind One at 7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 18, in a free Prairie Lights reading streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

In addition to Kind One, Hunt has written four genre-bending novels: The Impossibly; The Exquisite; Indiana, Indiana; and Ray of the Star. His work has also appeared in several recent anthologies including Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, in which the Village Voice says “Laird Hunt’s Kissability, in its distillation of inchoate teenage longing, is…as lovely a passage as anything in pop music.”

Born in Singapore and educated at Indiana University and the Sorbonne in Paris, Hunt has also lived in Tokyo, London, the Hague, New York City, and on an Indiana farm. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he now lives in Boulder, Colo.

In Kind One, teenage girl Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother’s second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm “90 miles from nowhere.” In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Lancaster’s “paradise”—a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia, who work at the farm, until Lancaster’s attentions turn to them and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Lancaster’s death change all three women for life.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681.