Join us for the International Writing Program at Prairie Lights Sunday Reading Series to hear IWP 2022 Fall Residency writers Mashiul Alam মশিউল আলম and Cherie Jones—as well as University of Iowa MFA Candidate in Literary Translation Vala Thorodds—read from their work.

Mashiul Alam মশিউল আলম (journalist, fiction writer, translator; Bangladesh) has published 12 novels and novellas, and eight collections of short stories; among the titles are Tanusreer Songey Dwitiyo Raat [Second Night with Tanusree] (2000), Mangsher Karbar [The Meat Market] (2002), Abedalir Mrittur Por  [After Abedali's Death] (2004),  and Pakistan [Pakistan] (2011). Among his many published stories, “Milk” was awarded the 2019 Himal South Asian Short Story Prize; a collection of his stories, in Shabnam Nadiya's translation,  won a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He has translated Russian classics into Bengali. In 2019, he was awarded the debut Sylhet Mirror Prize for Literature.  His participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State 

Cherie Jones (fiction; Barbados) was a finalist for UK’s 2021 Women’s Prize in Fiction for her first novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, now published in the UK, US, and in French and German translations. Her first story collection, The Burning Bush Women & Other Stories, appeared in 2004; other short fiction came out in Feminist Wire and elsewhere, and was broadcast on BBC. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State has provided the grant for her participation. 

Vala Thorodds is a poet, publisher, and editor, as well as a translator from Icelandic to English. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, Granta, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, and she recently received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of the novel Swanfolk by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, published in 2022. Her translation of Ómarsdóttir’s selected poems, Waitress in Fall, was a White Review and Sunday Times poetry book of the year. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship.