Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumna Michelle Herman will read from her new book, Stories We Tell Ourselves, at 7 p.m. Monday, March 25, 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.

The two extended essays that make up Stories We Tell Ourselves draw from the author’s richly diverse experiences and history. A steady accumulation of fascinating science, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history—ranging as far and wide as neuro-ophthalmology, ancient dream interpretation, and the essential differences between Jung and Freud—is smoothly intermixed with vivid anecdotes, entertaining digressions, and a disarming willingness to risk everything in the course of a revealing personal narrative.

Phillip Lopate, author of Art of the Personal Essay, says of Stories, “This persistently amusing and endearingly eccentric book demonstrates the elasticity and élan of the personal essay in the hands of a consummate practitioner, as well as the plentiful resources of its author’s consciousness.”

Herman is the author of the novels Dog and Missing, the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood, which was a finalist in the autobiography/memoir category for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in 2006. She teaches at Ohio State University.

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.