Writers' Workshop graduate Delaney Nolan will read from her new novel, Happy Bad, and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa Associate Professor Jamel Brinkley.

Astra House gives this plot summary of Happy Bad:

"Beatrice works at Twin Bridge, a chronically underfunded residential treatment center in near-future East Texas, teeming with enraged teenage girls on either too many or not enough drugs. On a normal day, it's difficult for Beatrice and the other staff — Arda, Carmen, and Linda — to keep their cool in dust-blown Askewn. But when a heat wave triggers a massive, sustained blackout, Beatrice and the other staff and residents must evacuate. Facing police brutality, sweltering heat, panicked evacuees, the girls' mounting withdrawal, and the consequences of her own lies, they search for a route out of the blackout zone."

Julia Phillips, author of Bear and Disappearing Earth, praises Happy Bad as "a brutal, joyful, surprising, and gorgeous novel of human contradictions," while the New Orleans Times-Picayune says: "Nolan is a skillful satirist, and one whose aim is extensive, wickedly funny and true."

Delaney Nolan is the author of the novel Happy Bad and an investigative journalist based in New Orleans. Her fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and has been chosen as a notable for Best American Essays. She received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship in fiction. Her reporting appears in The Guardian, The Nation, Sierra Magazine, The Intercept, Al Jazeera, Mother Jones, and elsewhere.

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories, and A Lucky Man: Stories, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Iowa City and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}