Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of Prairie Lights Books, has authored a loving paean to our local literary scene published this month in the online arm of Poets and Writers. In Iowa City, Weissmiller recounts coming to town in the late '70s, unaware of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the city’s deep literary heritage that has drawn writers here for decades:

The town’s literary history was astounding, but the world of academic creative writing outside of it was still small, and an uninformed youth such as myself could still exit the interstate, sixty-five miles west of the Mississippi River, having heard nothing of its history.