Prairie Lights is an independent bookstore in downtown Iowa City, Iowa, founded in 1978. In 1982, the store moved from South Linn Street to its present location on South Dubuque Street, the site of a coffee house that had in the 1930s hosted a local literary society and its guests, who included Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings and others. As one of Iowa's largest bookstores and the major independent bookstore in the hometown of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the building continues to play a role in its region's literary culture.