Events Calendar

Sanjena Sathian will read from her new novel, Goddess Complex, joined in conversation by Ren Arcamone.

Sanjena Sathian is the author of the Goddess Complex, published by Penguin Press, and the critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, and more. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets. She also writes for screen, and is co-writing the television adaptation of Gold Diggers for a major streamer.

Sathian is an alumna of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught fiction at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Currently serving as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University, she divides her time between Atlanta and Hong Kong.

Ren Arcamone is a writer from Sydney, Australia. She completed her BA at the University of Sydney and her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the 2020 Richard Yates Short Story Prize. In 2023, she received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She has received support from the University of Iowa, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Whiting Foundation, and PEN America, and she’s a proud alumna of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. Her fiction appears in Gulf Coast, HEAT, the Washington Square Review, and Electric Literature's Recommended Reading series. Based in Iowa City, she writes about ghosts, monsters, and ladies with big feelings, and she’s currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

_{To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.
Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}