Prairie Lights Books
Half a mile down the street from the country’s oldest and most prestigious graduate creative writing program, on the banks of the Iowa River and around the corner from the 100-year-old Englert Theatre, lives a brick building with a marble doorway and glass overhang. Behind the building’s double wooden doors live three whole floors of books. Only a few will greet you upon entry: a long, dense wall of paperback fiction on the right, an eclectic display of little-known “Selects”—approximately 100 titles—waiting for your discovery on the left, and tables straight ahead offering a combination of staff favorites and timely choices (most recently histories of Roe v Wade and books by Salman Rushdie) accompanied by a vase of fresh flowers.
Prairie Lights has called Iowa City home since May 1978, when Jim Harris opened an intimate store on South Linn Street. With only used bookshops and university bookstores at the time, Harris wanted a place where he could stock backlist poetry and prose alongside new titles. Prairie Lights became Iowa City’s first independent bookstore, as well as the first place in town to carry The New York Times. The store became a success with University of Iowa faculty members.
By 1980, Prairie Lights needed to expand their 1200-square-foot space, which lead to Harris moving the store to Dubuque Street in the fall of 1983. The first expansion of this new space happened in 1990 when Prairie Lights took over the second floor of the building. The store expanded again in 1993, renovating its basement to create a full floor of children’s books alongside a play space. A coffee house was also built, occupying a room where in the 1930s a local literary society hosted by the painter Grant Wood met and entertained the likes of Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and e. e. cummings, among others (legend says Gertrude Stein was once scheduled to come read at a society meeting but got sleeted in at Waukesha Airport in Wisconsin).
Jan Weissmiller was the first full-time employee at Prairie Lights when she started after graduating college in 1978. She later earned an MFA in Poetry at The University of Iowa. In 2008, she purchased the store from Harris with her then-partner and friend, the poet Jane Mead (who passed away in 2019). Weissmiller still runs the store today, helping Prairie Lights continue to serve and nurture its community.
“Bookstores are very democratic spaces,” says Weissmiller. “Everyone is welcome. Prairie Lights is a very open place where people from all walks of life feel comfortable and look forward to both extensive browsing and social interaction.” She adds, “Books touch so many aspects of life in any community that the possibilities of partnerships are endless.”
One large group of folks that Prairie Lights serves is the faculty and students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which allows employees of the store to engage in conversations with writers daily. But Prairie Lights also strives to make an impact on the wider Iowa City community, working on partnerships with local theatres, the independent cinema FilmScene, and—most notably—The Iowa Youth Writing Project, a nonprofit that pairs writing students at the University with at-risk children, who Prairie Lights love inviting into the store.
The pandemic’s effects over the past two years have highlighted the importance of these partnerships and the community at-large for Prairie Lights, especially when starting in March 2020, the store closed for fourteen months.
“We operated with a bare bones staff,” Weissmiller says, “filling online orders and doing curbside pick-up and free local delivery. The support we received from the community was a huge silver lining. And we are still feeling that.”
The store has maintained all of its full-time staff, but still struggles to maintain their usual, pre-pandemic 15 part-time staff members. Otherwise, they are working on getting back to normal, which includes continuing their impressive reading series which has run since 1990 and garnered much attention.
“For 18 years, our readings were actually broadcast over Iowa Public Radio,” Weissmiller tells me. “We called it ‘Live from Prairie Lights.’” When the public radio could no longer afford to host the show, Prairie Lights began streaming the readings themselves live, keeping the name.” Eula Biss, Vivian Gornick, and Celest Ng are a few of the folks who have participated in the series throughout recent years.
“I’ve always thought the readings at Prairie Lights are special because we can routinely count on large, well-informed audiences,” adds Weissmiller. “The Q&As are exceptional because of the writers that are always in the audience. Recently, there has been a trend toward ‘in-conversation’ events, and we are always able to draw wonderful conversation partners from the community of writers here.”
Weissmiller gives much credit and thanks to Prairie Lights current Events Coordinator Kathleen Johnson for the continuation of great readers and events today. “People sometimes tell me they sometimes come in just to be in her presence even if they don’t know the reader,” she adds.
Heading into the fall, Prairie Lights is excited to welcome Anthony Doerr, YiYun Li, Elizabeth McCracken, Randall Munroe (with his second volume of What If), Anthony Marra (reading from his new novel Mercury Pictures Presents), and more to the store. The staff hopes that these readings will bring a lot of attention to Prairie Light as they also look toward the start of holiday shopping season. Weissmiller is particularly excited to moderate an event with Jeff Deutsch, the Manager of The University of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore, about his recent book In Praise of Good Bookstores, released this past April.
Some of the ideas in this book have helped keep Weissmiller remain optimistic about the future of independent bookselling as she heads nearer to the end of the year. “The challenges are huge,” she admits, “but bookseller do persevere!”
Recommendations from the Bookseller
The latest from Pulitzer Prize Winner Brooks tells the story of Lexington, an 1850 Kentucky race horse, and the many generations of people who become fascinated by his story after a Civil War-era painting of Lexington makes its way first into the hands of a 1950s art dealer, followed by a 21st century art historian and Smithsonian scientist. A June 2022 Indie Next Pick, Weissmiller found this historical novel of the unsung Black horsemen “well-research and incredibly moving.”
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg and Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg
“I am a short story reader,” says Weissmiller, “and Deborah Eisenberg’s are among my very favorites.” These two collections—the former combining four of her early volumes together, and the latter being her latest works—will certainly give the novice reader a healthy introduction to one of the greatest living American writing. “She masterfully combines plot and dialogue, takes on very serious, contemporary issues, and yet is never didactic,” adds Weissmiller. “She has an incredibly nuanced sense of humor. I can’t recommend these more highly.”
The Heart of American Poetry by Edward Hirsch
Released earlier this year from the Library of America, this collection offers forty thoughtful, in-depth essays from Hirsch on poems both big and small that beg the question of how Americans have viewed themselves in the past and in today’s society. “Whether he is writing about famous or lesser-known poets, Hirsch brings considerable knowledge and sensitivity to bear in these essays,” says Weissmiller, who particularly enjoyed the piece on Anthony Hecht. “This is a wonderful book for both those looking for ways to engage with poetry and those seasoned readers who want a new perspective.”
