Bennett Sims, graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will read from his zombie-themed novel A Questionable Shape at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 1, 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.

In A Questionable Shape, which will be published May 21, the character Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie sleeve, a smashed window, and a pool of blood in his father's house; the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father's haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down. However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained, and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch's father.

“Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov's, Nicholson Baker's gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance,” says author Wells Tower.

Sims is a Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa this academic year, teaching creative writing. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Department of English both reside within 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.