Debra Spark, alumna of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will read from her work at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 18, 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.

Spark also will give a lecture called “That’s Funny” at 11 a.m. Thursday, April 18, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library, adjacent to the Dey House. The lecture, free and open to the public, is about writers who use humor in their fiction and what can be learned from them and from authors who are funny but mean.

Spark is author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown, and Good for the Jews. She edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. Her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, was published in 2012 by Four Way Books.

Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, the New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, the Washington Post, Maine Home + Design, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all UI-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in 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.