Natalie Bakopoulos in conv with Dean Bakopoulos - Archipelago

Name: Natalie Bakopoulos in conv with Dean Bakopoulos - Archipelago
Start: 2025-09-11T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240

Schedule

Thu, 11 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

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

University of Michigan alum Natalie Bakopoulos will read from her newest novel, Archipelago, and will be joined in conversation by her brother, University of Iowa associate professor of cinema and head of screenwriting arts, Dean Bakopoulos. Compared by Tin House to works from Katie Kitamura, Rachel Cusk, and Deborah Levy, Archipelago is "a striking, haunting novel that offers meditations on the slippery borders of nations, languages, middle age, and the self" (tinhouse.com). Author Lydia Kiesling praises Archipelago as "a gorgeous, haunting novel about translation, narrative, and the slippage between selves: who we are and who others believe us to be," while Laura Van Der Berg says, "This novel is a gorgeously sly page-turner."

Natalie Bakopoulos is the author most recently of Archipelago (Tin House). Her other novels include Scorpionfish and The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, MQR, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She’s an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. She’s on the faculty of Writing Workshops in Greece.

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the novels Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Summerlong (Ecco/HarperCollins). The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEA fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction, Bakopoulos is an associate professor of cinema and head of screenwriting arts at University of Iowa. A WGA screenwriter, he co-wrote the film adaptation of his first novel and is co-creator and executive producer of the HBO MAX series Made for Love. His first feature film, Don’t Come Back from the Moon, was a New York Times’ Critics Pick directed by Bruce Thierry Cheung and starring Rashida Jones. Bakopoulos is currently developing several original projects for television at major studios and production companies, including an adaptation on his short story, "The Dog."