Wells Tower, writer of short stories and nonfiction, will present a free reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 28, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library, adjacent to the Dey House.

Tower is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the 2002 Plimpton (Discovery) Prize from the Paris Review, and a Henfield Foundation Award. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Tower's first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, in 2009. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani picked it as one of her 10 best books of 2009. It was also a finalist for The Story Prize.

In June 2010, Tower was named as one of the New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. On June 10, 2010, he was presented with the Tenth Annual New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a $10,000 prize for an American writer under 40. His work was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2010.

Visit www.litshow.com/2010/02/02/wells-tower-2162010 to hear a 2010 interview with Wells on KRUI’s The Lit Show.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a graduate program in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.