Prairie Lights Books

The cafe floor was the first Java House, in April 1994; Java House left, the coffee stayed, and the bookstore runs it now, with beer and wine alongside the espresso. Jim Harris had opened the store in May 1978 in about a thousand square feet on South Linn, and moved to 15 S. Dubuque in 1982. In 2007 he asked two poets to buy it: Jan Weissmiller, a 1978 Iowa graduate who had worked there for years, and Jane Mead. The sale closed in 2008. Mead died in 2019; the Daily Iowan found Weissmiller running it alone in 2023, and a second-floor nook keeps Mead's poems framed. USA Today called it a destination bookstore in 2008. Live from Prairie Lights ran on WSUI for eighteen years before moving to KRUI-FM in October 2010; the store's calendar names the nights. Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney and Saul Bellow have all read here.