Melissa Febos in conv with Donika Kelly - The Dry Season [paperback release]

Name: Melissa Febos in conv with Donika Kelly - The Dry Season [paperback release]
Start: 2026-06-01T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240

Schedule

Mon, 01 Jun, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240 | Iowa City, IA

Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program Professor and bestselling author Melissa Febos will read from her newest memoir, The Dry Season, for its paperback release, and will be joined in conversation with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Taking place after the challenging relationship Febos describes in her second book, Abandon Me, The Dry Season examines "the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster" (melissafebos.com). Over the course of a year, Febos chronicles her own discoveries of pleasure without sex and combines her earned wisdom with cultural criticism of other influential women, including Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, and Sappho. Leslie Jamison, bestselling author of The Recovering and Splinters, praises The Dry Season as "an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly," while Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and most recently, Like Love: Essays and Conversations, says, "Reading The Dry Season is like having a nourishing conversation with a smart, wry, and ever-probing friend—a conversation so full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end...The example of Febos’s commitment throughout these pages is inspiring and rare; we’re lucky and better off for it."
Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and a new memoir, The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in The Nonfiction Writing Program (melissafebos.com).
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length poetry collections The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry; Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and The Natural Order of Things, which was published in the fall of 2025 by Graywolf. Kelly’s poetry has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned her BA in English from Southern Arkansas University, an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere (adapted from english.uiowa.edu).