Iowa Writers' Workshop alum and current Iowa Summer Writing Festival instructor Jared Joseph will read from his newest book, Soft Lightning. Bench Editions describes Soft Lightning as "written almost exclusively in the first-person singular and plural, and stages a motley of narrators (or only one) who respond to one another or who do not, and if not, I wonder whether desire for interpersonal connection withers, or excruciates. There is no setting. See if you are in it" (bencheditions.com).

Jared Joseph lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University. Recent work has been published in Notre Dame Review, Gulf Coast, and Interim. Joseph’s book Danny the Ambulance, published by Outpost19, is a novel about a bar full of people named Danny; Rose Mask, published by Five Nine, is a work of theater staging the repetitive and ineluctable hell that is the service industry. Soft Lighting, forthcoming from Bench in 2025, will be a setting-less novel (iowasummerwritingfestival.uiowa.edu).

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}