Prairie Lights Books invites you to hear Iowa MFA graduate Jonathan Gleason read from his debut essay collection, Field Guide to Falling Ill, winner of the inaugural Yale Nonfiction Book Prize. He will be joined in conversation with Sarah Minor.
“’What was wrong with them? That’s what we wanted to know.’ So begins this prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, Gleason illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness. With sharp analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complicated people who practice it.” [Yale University Press]
In her foreword, Meghan O’Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that “illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome. But as Gleason’s work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us—to history, to culture, to one another.”
Jonathan Gleason is a writer, instructor, medical interpreter, and recent graduate of the University of Iowa's MFA program in creative writing. He was a recipient of a 2023 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a 2024 finalist for the 2024 Granum Prize. His work is anthologized in Best American Essays (2024) and has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Literary Hub, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fugue, Denver Quarterly, Redivider Journal, and others.
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She's the author of Carousel, forthcoming from Yale University Press, Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). Minor serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at BRINK Magazine and on the Nonfiction editorial team at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction MFA Program.