Erica Bernheim and Chris Dombrowski will read from their poetry at 7 p.m. Monday, April 29, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

Bernheim, an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of the poetry collection The Mimic Sea. In addition to her Master of Fine Arts, she received a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since 2008, she has been an assistant professor of English at Florida Southern College, where she teaches creative writing and directs the Honors Program.

Robyn Schiff, director of undergraduate writing in the UI Department of English, says of The Mimic Sea, “As brilliantly and extravagantly hued as some rare fighting fish dangerously residing with us in the living room within the confines of the domestic version of the aquariums for which this wondrous collection is named, The Mimic Sea displays myriad radiant tones that shift as they catch the light—ominous, flirtatious, chilling, elegiac, and coy—and like all great poems and the most urgent spiritual addresses, it's impossible to say whether Bernheim's poems unfurl in courtship or in rage. These poems are dazzling, surprising, and as heartbreaking as they are venomous.”

Dombrowski received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Montana. His publications include the chapbook Fragments with Dusk in Them and the collection By Cold Water.

His honors include the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award and Alligator Juniper’s National Poetry Prize. His poems have been anthologized in Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry.

He has taught at the University of Montana and the Interlochen Center for the Arts, where he was a writer-in-residence. He lives in Missoula, Mont.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a graduate program in the University of Iowa 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.