I’m excited to be reading in Iowa this week—at Prairie Lights tonight and at Grinnell College, with Saadi Simawe, on Thursday. Details of the PL reading tonight are below (the previous post) and the Grinnell reading is in the Rosenfield Center, Room 101, at 8 p.m. on Thursday evening.

Also, I just added a review to my reviews page! See a take on Love Marriage by Charles Sarvan, writing for Confluence magazine.

I am reading at one of my favorite bookstores in the world tomorrow: the estimable Prairie Lights, where I spent many hours as a graduate student. 7:30 p.m. Awesome! In fact, the state of Iowa is awesome. If you have any doubts about this, look at the photo above. That’s a rally in Iowa City, following the state Supreme Court’s decision that gay marriage will become legal here.

Thanks to my pal Laura for the photo.

Thanks, Rocky Mountain News! One of my Iowa classmates, Nina Siegal, is also on this list.

Read some of my reading recs for the year here. Thanks to my Iowa pal Edan Lepucki for asking me to do that! It’s a great blog.

I’m scheduled to read at Book Soup in Los Angeles on August 28! I’m excited for a return to the West Coast.

And it turns out that I will be reading at Prairie Lights after all! One year from publication… to the day! April 8, 2009—a day after I read at Grinnell. I am already looking forward to going to Iowa.

I’ll be visiting several schools over the next year. If you’re interested in having me visit your school, please write to me via the contact form.

Found this via the blog of my former professor, Jim Hynes.

Simply: hurray. Jim kept up with the controversy pretty well on his blog, so if you want to see the twists and turns it took, I advise reading him. Actually, I advise reading him generally. He writes about topics dear to me, including the moral complexity of nationhood/violence/ terrorism (The Wild Colonial Boy) and the machinations of academia (Publish and Perish; The Lecturer’s Tale). We also have virtually identical taste in films and television, so I enjoy his cultural criticism. Quite often he recommends something that I enjoy enormously.

This is outrageous. Fortunately we have Kembrew McLeod spearheading efforts against. This would be a disaster. My thesis will NOT be on the Internets for free without my consent! Nor should others be forced to sign over their rights in exchange for an education at a public university. Appalling, Hawkeyes. Appalling.

I chatted with Sree Sreenivasan, one of the founders of SAJA, for SAJA Radio this morning. We talked about my plans as SAJA VP, my forthcoming novel, my journalism career and its connection to my literary life, and how the media covers Sri Lanka. Listen here. You can also listen to chats with the new secretary, Anusha Srivastava, or the new president, Sandeep Junnarkar.

Early in November, I did a reading at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as part of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective and its annual literary festival, which this year was called Electric Ladyland. It was a ton of fun—the first time I’ve read from the novel here in New York. T-minus four months to publication! Thanks to Preston Merchant for the photo. Ashok Vyas of iTV was also kind enough to send me a DVD of his program on literature, “Shabd Star,” which broadcast interviews and segments of the festival. I’ll be on the lookout to see if it gets re-aired.

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My former professor, the most excellent Jim Hynes, has just launched his eponymous site. Definitely go check it out—my personal favorite among his books is The Wild Colonial Boy.

Jim is a great writer—and also a great teacher. I took his novel-writing class when he was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop a couple of years ago.