Free Generative Writing Workshops are proud to present our lineup for 2018. Following the workshops, we will be digitizing the prompts and select responses, so please do check back and see what we all create together.
January 21 2018
Tameka Cage Conley, PhD is a literary artist who writes fiction, poetry, plays and essays. She received a doctoral degree in English in 2006 from Louisiana State University, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship. Her dissertation, Painful Discourses, was awarded the annual Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award. She has received writing fellowships from the Cave Canem Poetry Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and Workshops. In October 2013, she received the Eben Demarest Trust grant, awarded annually to an artist or archaeologist. Past recipients of the Demarest include painter James Pollock (1945) and choreographer Kyle Abraham (2012). She held a Truman Capote fellowship in Fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop from 2016-17 and is currently a Graduate Fellow in the program. A Gathering of Sons, the opera for which she wrote the libretto, commissioned by Pittsburgh Festival Opera, recently had its world premiere and was met with acclaim.
February 16 2018
Lyz Lenz has published essays and journalism in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, The Guardian, ESPN, Marie Claire, Mashable, Salon, and more. She her book on religion and the Midwest is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Her book Belabored: Tales of Myth, Medicine, and Motherhood is forthcoming from Norton. She also has an essay in the forthcoming anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay. She has an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University and is the managing editor at The Rumpus.
March 18 2018
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri attended high school in Iowa and Seoul, studied at the University of Oslo, and taught English as Second Language in Madrid. She has a dual B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications and International Studies from Iowa State University, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, ILK, Alice Blue Review, Thrush Poetry Journal and elsewhere; she was also a poetry editor at Barnstorm. Before joining the International Writing Program she taught ESL at the University of New Hampshire.
April 15 2018
Inara Verzemnieks is the author of the memoir Among the Living and the Dead, published by W.W. Norton. A Pushcart Prize winner and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, she previously worked as a newspaper journalist for thirteen years. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, and Creative Nonfiction. She is an assistant professor with the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.
may 20 2018
Daniel Khalastchi is the author of two books of poetry, Manoleria (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Tradition (McSweeney’s, 2015). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he currently directs the Frank N. Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing at the University of Iowa.
July 15 2018
Derek Nnuro is a Ghanaian-American fiction writer based in Iowa City. He is a graduate of the fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a recipient of the Meta Rosenberg Memorial Fellowship and a Teaching Writing Fellowship. He was awarded the Robert J. Schulze Fellowship in 2016. He is working on an untitled novel set in Ghana, West Africa; Houston, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia, and teaches novel writing at the University of Iowa
august 19 2018
Derek Nnuro is a Ghanaian-American fiction writer based in Iowa City. He is a graduate of the fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a recipient of the Meta Rosenberg Memorial Fellowship and a Teaching Writing Fellowship. He was awarded the Robert J. Schulze Fellowship in 2016. He is working on an untitled novel set in Ghana, West Africa; Houston, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia, and teaches novel writing at the University of Iowa
September 16 2018
Kerry Howley is the author of Thrown, a New York Times Notable Book, New York Times Editor’s Choice, and pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues. Writing in Salon, critic Lydia Kiesling called Thrown “extraordinary,” “incredibly bracing,” and reminiscent of “some of the boldest voices of twentieth-century fiction.” Novelist Lev Grossman called it “probably the most bizarre and fascinating book I’ve read this year” in the pages of Time, adding: “The precision of Howley’s prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace…. She writes like somebody in ecstasy.” Thrown has been translated into four languages and optioned by the actress Rebecca Hall.
Howley is a frequent contributor to New York Magazine. Her fiction and essays have also appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Bookforum. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and currently at work on a nonfiction thriller about the American surveillance state, forthcoming from Knopf.
October 21 2018
Stephen Lovely was born in Dallas, Texas and spent most of his childhood in Ohio. He attended Kenyon College, where he majored in English, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied with Deborah Eisenberg, Margot Livesey, Ethan Canin, and Frank Conroy. His first novel, Irreplaceable, was published by Hyperion/Voice in 2009 and translated into German, Dutch, and Chinese.Irreplaceable received the Dana Award for the Novel and a James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. Since 2005 Stephen has been the director of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, a summer, residential creative writing program for high school students at The University of Iowa. He currently lives in Iowa City with his wife and dog and cats. He is working on a second novel. It is taking longer than he expected.