Bret Anthony Johnston will read from his new short story collection, Encounters with Unexpected Animals, and will be joined in conversation with Iowa Writers' Workshop director Lan Samantha Chang. Described as "an imaginative, moving collection of stories infused with the magic and enigma of the human condition and drenched in Texas heat," Encounters with Unexpected Animals is praised by The New York Times as "A cause for celebration," while John Irving, New York Times bestselling author of The...

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.

A former vice president of the South...

Poet, translator, and essayist Hai-Dang Phan is the author of the poetry collection Reenactments (Sarabande, 2019) and the translator of Phan Nhiên Hạo’s selected volume of poems, Paper Bells (The Song Cave, 2020). Phan has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Grinnell College.