IWP Sunday Reading Series

October 1, 2023 - 4:00pm

Prairie Lights

Join us for the International Writing Program's Prairie Lights Reading Series this Sunday to hear readings by two 2023 Fall Residency writers and one University of Iowa MFA student.

Yashika Graham (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual artist; Jamaica), the winner of the 2019 Mervyn Morris Prize for Poetry, has also received a Centrum Writer’s Residency. Her poetry, prose, and literary criticism have been published internationally; her debut collection Some of Us Can Go Back Home is forthcoming from Blouse & Skirt Books.

Li Kotomi (novelist, essayist, translator; Taiwan/ Japan) is the author of Hitorimai, published in 2022 as Solo Dance, Porarisu ga furisosogu yoru [Night of the Shining North Star] (2020), and Higanbana ga saku shima [The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom] (2021). She is the winner of the Akutagawa Prize. Kotomi writes in Japanese, self-translating her work into Mandarin. .

Derick Edgren Otero is a third-year MFA candidate in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Most recently a 2023 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat Playwriting Fellow and recipient of the KCACTF Region V Latinx Playwriting Award, their bilingual play Mother:Knife, developed with La MaMa Umbria, premiered in the University of Iowa’s Gallery Series in October 2022.

Aron Aji

October 3, 2023 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Director of Translation Programs Aron Aji will read from his new translation of the dark and exciting novel Lojman, by Ebru Ojen. "A parable of violence—of state mandation, of mothering alone, of being mothered, of the vastness of nature—that shocks the system like stepping out the front door into a snowstorm. What does it mean to be a woman, and to be mothered by women, who have suffered under such alienation? Ebru Ojen captures the experience of immense pain with dark fervor and deft lyricism."—Makenna Goodman

Aron Aji is the President of The American Literary Translators Association. He has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, Ferit Edgü and other Turkish writers. His translations of Bilge Karasu: Death in Troy; The Garden of Departed Cats won the 2004 National Translation Award; and A Long Day’s Evening won an NEA Literature Fellowship, and was short-listed for the 2013 PEN Translation Prize. He is Director of Translation Programs at the University of Iowa.

Ebru Ojen was born in 1981 to Kurdish parents in Malatya.  She has published three novels, and is one of the most important emerging female voices in Turkish literature.

Michael Dumanis & Johannes Göransson

October 5, 2023 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Join us for an evening with Writers’ Workshop graduates and poets Michael Dumanis and Johannes Göransson.

Jericho Brown calls Michael Dumanis’s Creature “a brilliant book, a gift that fills needs we didn’t know we needed. This book is a word-drunk movement. I am so envious that I didn’t write it.”

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collections Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, Dumanis emigrated with his family at the age of five and grew up in Western New York. He holds a BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Dumanis joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2012.

Of Johannes Göransson’s Summer, PJ Lombardo says, “I burned through my first read of this book in an afternoon. It is a mesmerizing artwork, a nerve loaded with punishing sensitivity.” 

Poet and translator Johannes Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia. The author of several books of poetry, his poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and broad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). His is he is the program director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame and, together with Joyelle McSweeney, edits Action Books.

One Community One Book - Joanne Ramos at Pomerantz Center

October 8, 2023 - 1:30pm

C20 Pomerantz Center at University of Iowa

The Iowa City Book Festival and The UI Center for Human Rights present Joanne Ramos, for a special Keynote Event  and book signing at C20 Pomerantz Center at 1:30 pm.  The UI Center for Human Rights selected Joanne Ramos's The Farm as this year's One Community, One Book title. Told from the perspective of four women, The Farm explores gender, race, and class, and of who has access to power, freedom, and choice.