Write at the Stanley: A Generative Writing Workshop is back for the Fall Semester!

Join us monthly to generate new creative writing inspired by works in the Stanley collection. Each session will be led by a different talented writer from our area, who will be offering a new prompt and a new approach to ekphrastic writing (writing inspired by visual art). Bring your own notebook and pencil or computer and leave with the beginning of a newly written piece.

Co-sponsored by Iowa City Poetry. Teen and...

Poet CA Conrad will read from their new book from Wave Books, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. Anne Boyer says in a New York Times review: "How are we to believe in Earth if we can’t believe in the Heavens? In the plodding directionlessness of the present, we are lost without the astral maps. I want to point out too CAConrad’s signature care for the visual impact of the poem. The disciplined shaping means that the poetic line here not only carries sound and sentiment but builds toward a...

Writers' Workshop alum Elin Hilderbrand will read from her newest book, The Academy, and will be joined in conversation with current Writers' Workshop director, Lan Samantha Chang. Described as an "irresistible, deliciously scandalous story of one drama-filled year at a New England boarding school," The Academy was co-written by Elin's daughter Shelby Cunningham (who will not be present) and is praised on Goodreads: "Ever since reading Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld I’ve been hoping to find another...

Writers' Workshop graduate Adedayo Agarau will read from The Years of Blood, winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025), and will be joined in conversation with fellow WW graduate, Othuke Umukoro. Remica Bingham-Risher says of The Years of Blood: "Evil is a question for God and beauty emerges despite what the politicians have ruined...In this harrowing collection, Agarau shapes and sifts through shadow until light treads steadily...