For more than 80 years writers have come to Iowa City to work on their manuscripts and to exchange ideas about writing and reading with each other and with the faculty. Many of them have gone on to publish award-winning work after graduating. With the spirit of an arts colony and the benefits of the research University of which we are a part, the Writers' Workshop continues to foster and to celebrate American literature in all its varied forms.

Upcoming Events

Carmen Maria Machado: Reading promotional image

Carmen Maria Machado: Reading

Saturday, January 24, 2026 8:00pm
Dey House

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, The New York...

Live from Prairie Lights | Tramaine Suubi in conv with Margaret Yapp - 'Stages'

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Writers' Workshop graduate Tramaine Suubi will read from their newest poetry collection, Stages, and will be joined in conversation with poet and Writers' Workshop graduate Margaret Yapp. Described as an inspiration "by the evolution of our brightest star," Stages "offers poems alluding to the history of how it came to be and its effects on each human life...Readers will discover poems exploring everything from the gimmicks of capitalism to the false promises of tranquility" (tramainesuubi.com...

Matthew Neill Null: Reading promotional image

Matthew Neill Null: Reading

Thursday, February 5, 2026 8:00pm
Dey House

Matthew Neill Null is a recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Michener–Copernicus Society of America Award. His stories appear in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, PEN /O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A native of West Virginia...

Program News

Andrea Brady seated; her book, Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint, with colorful concentric circle artwork

Andrea Brady receives 2025 Truman Capote Award

Wednesday, October 8, 2025
The prestigious prize is the largest annual cash award for English-language literary criticism and will be awarded to poet and Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, Andrea Brady.
Covers of: The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Only Son by Kevin Moffet, The Pelican Child by Joy Williams, Things in Nature Only Grow by Yiyun Li

4 Iowa alums longlisted for National Book Award

Wednesday, September 17, 2025