
Prairie Lights Books invites you to join Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program graduate Jeremy Jones as he reads from his newest book, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries, and is joined in conversation with former NWP professor Kerry Howley.
Publisher Blair gives the following synopsis of Cipher: "In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood.
“The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. ‘The reader is left,’ the codebreaker wrote,’ with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.’
“But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather. Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg.
“With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself."
Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble, praises Cipher as "[laying] bare the life of his fourth great-grandfather, William, with a rigor befitting the diaries William kept and encoded over the course of his life," while Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders, says, "Jeremy Jones' Cipher introduces us to a lost ancestor’s coded diaries and brings them to life with prose as intricate and revelatory as the secrets they contain, unraveling the vivid, conflicted world of William Thomas Prestwood—a nineteenth-century farmer, philosopher, and flawed human being. With lyrical precision and unflinching honesty, Jones transforms archival fragments into a haunting meditation on history, inheritance, and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves."
Jeremy Jones is the author the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland(Blair, 2014). Bearwallow was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and was awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book (IPPY) Awards in memoir. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and Brevity, among others. He also writes frequently for Our State Magazine. Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, in his native North Carolina. He also serves as the series co-editor for In Place: a literary nonfiction book series from WVU Press.
Kerry Howley is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of Bottom’s Up and the Devil Laughs, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In the Times, critic Jennifer Szalai called Bottom’s Up “riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” Howley’s first book, Thrown, was a pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues, translated into five languages, and named among the top 100 books of the year in the New York Times.
Howley is the screenwriter behind WINNER, a film directed by Susanna Fogel starring Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, and Zach Galifianakus. The coming of age comedy debuted at Sundance in 2024. In 2020 Howley left a professorship at the University of Iowa’s celebrated Nonfiction MFA program to join the staff of New York Magazine, where she has published essays about Erewhon, Jorie Graham, and January 6th. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Harper’s. A 2025 Guggenheim Foundation fellow, Lannan Foundation Fellow and three-time National Magazine Award nominee, she divides her time between Iowa City and Los Angeles.