Christine Sneed will read from her latest book, Little Known Facts, at 7 p.m. Friday, May 3, 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.

Little Known Facts focuses on a family in Los Angeles. The father, Renn Ivins, is a film star whose fame and success overshadow the lives of his two grown children, a son and a daughter, in ways that make it difficult for them to achieve personal and professional successes of their own. In her starred Booklist review, Donna Seaman says, “Sneed’s wit, curiosity, empathy, and ability to divine the perfect detail propel this psychologically exquisite, superbly realized novel of intriguing, caricature-transcending characters and predicaments.”

Sneed is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts creative writing program at Indiana University and has published stories in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, New England Review, the Southern Review, Ploughshares, Pleiades, Glimmer Train, Massachusetts Review, Meridian, Other Voices, Greensboro Review, River Styx, Phoebe, South Dakota Review, and many other journals. Her short-story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won the 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize.

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.