UI professor, poet Paige Lewis talks about the books they love (and the dogs that chew them)

Lewis' new book, Canon, will be published in May

Thursday, April 16, 2026

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The thousands of books occupying several cozy, sunlit rooms in Paige Lewis' home were once organized alphabetically. Then a well-meaning houseguest secretly unleashed chaos, reshelving them all by color while cat-sitting.

Lewis, a University of Iowa English professor and poet, took it in stride. ("More than anything, I want / the ability to respond perfectly / to tragedy," Lewis wrote years earlier in their first book, Space Struck.) They and their husband, UI English professor and author Kaveh Akbar, undid the color sorting but "sadly, couldn't muster up the strength to redo the alphabetical," Lewis says.

Paige Lewis holds a copy of their new book, "Canon."

For their much-anticipated debut novel, Canon, to be published in May by Viking, Lewis found inspiration on shelves now loosely sorted into poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and books about writing. Their funny, genre-bending novel, about two heroes on a journey to kill the same man, blends Lewis' deep interests in epic poetry, religion, and animals (there's a talking whale named HOWBIG! and a lie-detecting, color-changing newt).

"It's secretly an epic poem in prose," Lewis says. "I love epics, so everything kind of comes back to that. Stories with a hero's journey, those are the main inspirations."

They pointed out several books from their living room library, including Alice Notley's New York City subway-as-hell epic poem, The Descent of Alette ("it's been hugely influential, it's what first got me thinking about writing an epic"), and Harry Martinson's lost-in-space science fiction epic poem, Aniara ("I feel like no one ever reads this one, but I love it").

As a child growing up in a large, Catholic family in Florida, Lewis was inspired by C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series, but even more so his Space Trilogy. "They were so strange and filled with these hidden religious meanings - trying to figure them out as a 10-year-old was so fun," Lewis says. Canon itself was spun out of their 2018 poem, "Yael," named after the Old Testament woman who killed a man with a tent peg. "The story changed, but the tent peg is still there because it was just a really wild way to murder someone," Lewis says.

Lewis' interest in animals is visible across their library, which includes toy storage for the couple's two energetic dogs, Moosh and Galilee. The partially chewed cover of one of Lewis' favorite books, Joanna Russ' essay collection, To Write Like a Woman, illustrates why valuable books such as a first edition of Frank O'Hara poetry are now stored on shelves safely outside the dogs' chomping range. The dogs share space with two cats, Jub-Jub and Filfy (seen here on Lewis' UI bio page), the occasional rescued betta fish, and, each spring, the caterpillars Lewis finds in their yard and raises to butterflies.

The partially chewed cover of "To Write Like a Woman" is why Paige Lewis now keeps valuable books outside of their dogs' chomping range.

Animal-themed books in their library include poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, which opens with the description of a goat head hanging in a tree and singing, and includes another poem titled "Dead Doe." "The poems are beyond beautiful, but they can sometimes be difficult for me to read," Lewis says. "I'm the sort of person who won't watch a movie with a dog in it until I know for a fact that the dog survives." UI English professor and poet Donika Kelly's The Natural Order of Things is also a standout ("the way Donika writes about ocean life - it's incredible, always inspirational"). Kelly and her wife, UI professor and memoirist Melissa Febos, are neighbors and close friends.

That proximity is part of why Lewis loves being at Iowa. "Just to be around so many incredible writers who were like inspirations to us before we even knew them, it's amazing," Lewis says. "It seems like such a dream and also something that only Iowa City could provide."

If there was a fire and they could pick only one book to save, it would be their copy of Heather Christle's poetry collection, Heliopause. Their favorite poem from the book, "Elegy for Neil Armstrong," is an erasure of the radio transcript from NASA's first moon landing. "Mankind is fine / and powdery," Lewis reads. "I can pick it up / loosely with my toe."

On the other side of the library, Lewis pages through their dog-eared, heavily underlined, freshman-year copy of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which still has their dorm phone number penciled inside the cover. They love its language so much they often play a 30-hour, 1982 Irish radio dramatization of it while washing dishes or walking the dogs. "It's so much more fun hearing it out loud," Lewis says.

In this video, Paige Lewis talks about the books they keep and why.

Inside the book, Lewis found an unscrolled old restaurant napkin band on which they and Akbar had written a poem together, each adding one word at a time while waiting for their food. It ends: "If you forget my name, just hold a fish underwater until it sings. Then I'll sing back."

The couple has been writing together and for each other since meeting as Florida State University graduate students, a courtship that began when Akbar messaged Lewis over their shared love of The Simpsons (a mutual friend had posted Lewis' painting of Lisa Simpson reading The Bell Jar). Soon they were exchanging a poem every day and later writing at Starbucks together, surrounded by poetry books.

Today, Lewis writes mostly at a downtown Iowa City café, books still piled nearby, always in notebooks first ("it keeps me from second-guessing everything"). The filled notebooks are stashed throughout the house, creating an overflow situation that Lewis plans to resolve in the afterlife by having them set ablaze.

Lewis has no intention of ever relinquishing their books but at the same time isn't precious about them.

"I had a friend who stopped loaning me books because she was like, 'You don't treat them with enough respect,'" Lewis says. "I love to dog-ear books. I love to scribble. I think I'm on that side of 'They are books, and I want to enjoy them.' They're special to me because of the language in them."