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.

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Sam Chang and Lara Ehrlich

Lan Samantha Chang, Writers' Workshop director, talks to Laura Ehrlich about balancing writing and motherhood

Events

Events

Live from Prairie Lights | Margaret Yapp & Katie Berta- poetry

Friday, April 26, 2024 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books
Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, Margaret Yapp will read from Green for Luck: Poems To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.

Jane Smiley at the Iowa City Public Library in conversation with IPR's Charity Nebbe

Sunday, April 28, 2024 2:00pm
Iowa City Public Library
Please join us at the Iowa City Public Library for a special afternoon event with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, who will read from her new novel, Lucky. She will be joined in conversation by Iowa Public Radio's Charity Nebbe. Lucky is a soaring, soulful novel about a folk musician who rises to fame across our changing times. "Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her Uncle Drew took her to the...

Live from Prairie Lights | Jorrell Watkins & Romeo Oriogun

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books
Writers' Workshop alumni Jorrell Watkins and Romeo Oriogun will read from their poetry. Jorrell Watkins will read from Play/House, published by Northwestern University Press. “The ideas of 'play' and 'house' are interwoven gradually in Jorrell Watkins’ debut collection, with the changing light stretching and bending the shadows of masculinity, familial intimacy, and societal violences. Through his intense play with the vernacular and syntax of blk English, Watkins defamiliarizes urban Southern...