Join IWP online for a reading with acclaimed writers from North Macedonia, India, Bulgaria, and the U.S. all in one session! These four authors – Rumena Bužarovska (IWP Fall Resident ’18 #NorthMacedonia, U.S. Embassy North Macedonia), Mary Hickman (U.S.), Rochelle Potkar (FR ’15 #India, U.S. Embassy India), Vladimir Poleganov (FR ’16 #Bulgaria,  U.S. Embassy Sofia) – are current faculty for IWP’s online session of Between the Lines: Peace and the Writing Experience, a cultural exchange and creative writing program for students ages 15-18 supported through a cooperative agreement between the IWP, Exchange Programs - U.S. Department of State, and University of Iowa. 

Please register for the Zoom event here.

Rumena Bužarovska is a fiction writer and literary translator from Skopje, North Macedonia. An author of four volumes of short stories translated into more than ten languages, her book My Husband has been adapted into three stage productions in Ljubljana, Belgrade and Skopje. A 2018 resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she is a professor of American literature and translation at the Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. She is the co-author and co-organizer of the women’s storytelling initiative PeachPreach. 

Mary Hickman was born in Idaho and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Hickman is the author of two books of poems, This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Rayfish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), which won the JamesLaughlin Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and chosen by Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, and Carmen Giménez Smith. An assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, she also teaches in (and loves!) the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program.

Fictionist | Poet | Screenwriter, Rochelle Potkar is an alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University of Stirling (2017). Author of Four Degrees of Separation and Paper Asylum - shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020, her poetry film Skirt featured on Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland. Her short story collection Bombay Hangovers released in 2021. Widely-anthologized, a few of her poems and stories have won prizes. Her first screenplay was a quarter-finalist at the Atlanta Film Festival Screenwriting competition 2020. https://rochellepotkar.com/

Vladimir Poleganov (b. 1979, Sofia) is a Bulgarian writer, translator, and screenwriter. He is the author of one collection of short stories, The Deconstruction of Thomas S (published in 2013 by St. Kliment Ohridski University Press) and one novel, The Other Dream (2016, Colibri), which won the Helikon Award for Best Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. “The Birds”, a short story, was featured in Dalkey Archive Press’ anthology Best European Fiction 2016. In 2016, he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This was followed by residencies in Shanghai and Sun Yat-sen University in China. He has translated novels by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Octavia E. Butler, and Peter Beagle into Bulgarian. In 2020, his translation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo won the Association of Bulgarian Translators Prize. He is currently working on a PhD in Bulgarian literature at Sofia University where he also teaches courses on creative writing and fantastic literature.