Prairie Lights Books invites you to join in as Melissa Faliveno reads from her new novel, Hemlock. She will be joined in conversation with Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program professor Melissa Febos.
Featuring "a woman haunted by a dark inheritance [who] returned to the woods where her mother vanished," Hemlock is praised by Febos as "the gothic midwestern mystery we've all been waiting for" and adds, "I devoured this eerie, sexy parable of addiction and becoming. A delight from beginning to end."
Chelsea Bieker, bestselling author of Madwoman and Godshot, says: "Hauntingly visceral and utterly mesmerizing, Hemlock plunges into the shadowed and swirling terrain of dependence and its many faces. Melissa Faliveno weaves addiction as metamorphosis, desire as wilderness, in prose that pulses like a heartbeat. A debut of startling originality that reads like a fever dream and burrows beneath the skin. Hemlock is urgent, unapologetic, and utterly unforgettable."
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her writing has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Ms. magazine, Bitch magazine, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman and the forthcoming Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin and a long-time resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill.
Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which has been translated into ten languages and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller and an LA Times Bestseller. A new memoir, The Dry Season, was published by Alfred. A. Knopf in June 2025. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Black Mountain Institute, LAMBDA Literary, the American Library in Paris, and others, Melissa's work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The Best American Food and Travel Writing, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.