You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, and others. She has been nominated for Pushcart, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the CLMP Firecracker Awards. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, Second Place Winner of Kelsay Books' 2022 Women’s Poetry Contest, and the 2022 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award. A reader for Peauxdunque Review and editor for Bear Review, Nikki is the co-founder of lmnl lit, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has a poetry chapbook, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and a hybrid chapbook, Bayou Sonata (forthcoming, NOLA DNA, 2023). You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Laura Johnson holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and is a graduate (BA, MA) of the University of Iowa. Laura’s poetry and prose has appeared in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Prompt Press, and Wild Roof Journal, among others. She is a 2019 Best of Net Nominee. Laura’s chapbook, Memento Vivere (Cabin Bear Books), is available at laurajohnsonwriter.com and wherever you buy books. A second poetry collection and a collection of short stories are forthcoming in 2024. 

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Sarah Minor is an essayist and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Prize in Prose, Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020), winner of the Big Other Nonfiction Book Award, and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016). She’s the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and an Individual Research Grant to Iceland from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Her essays have been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, Advanced Creative Nonfiction, and A Harp in the Stars. She currently teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at TriQuarterly Review.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, multi-genre writer, teacher, and public scholar. A 2022-23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author of Swoon (2022), whose title poem is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In addition to a co-authored chapbook Studies in Brotherly Love (PromptPress, 2021) and a poetic series A Doorknob for the Eye (2017), his poems have been published by Poetry Foundation, Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, A Hole in the Wall, The Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Bellingham Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, Prospect, wordgatherings, and The Art of Autism. His lyric essay “Passive Plants”, published in the Iowa Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018). He teaches inclusive, multigenerational, global poetry writing classes through Listen2Us and poetry writing courses for alternatively communicating autistics through the LYNX Project in Chicago. A public scholar, he teaches and presents nationally on a range of topics, including the NEH-sponsored talk on “Disrupting Ableism Through Artful Activism.” More recent scholarship includes an article in Logic Magazine titled “Disrupting the Garden Wall”; a co-authored essay titled “Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability” in Er(r)go; and a chapter “Unearthing the Concepts That Bury Us,” forthcoming in a scholarly anthology, Disability in Dialogue. He is also the co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017). Before moving to Iowa City, DJ graduated with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in 2017.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Sarah Rizzuto holds a Masters in English as well as a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University. She has also taught Disability Studies, a course she developed through Women and Gender Studies at SCSU. Sarah is the former president of the CT Poetry Society’s New Haven chapter. She’s been published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature as well as Kaleidoscope magazine. Sarah hopes to publish her first chapbook soon, which honors her father’s life. Along with being a poet, she considers herself an advocate for social justice.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Nicole VanderLinden’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Epiphany, Shenandoah, and elsewhere, and in 2020, Lauren Groff selected her story as the winner of the New Ohio Review Fiction Prize. She serves as the fiction/nonfiction book review editor for Colorado Review, is a reader for Ploughshares, and has been a Tennessee Williams fiction scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Iowa City and is finishing her first novel.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Lisa K. Roberts has taught literature and writing at universities in Hong Kong, Virginia, Las Vegas, and Nebraska. After moving to Iowa, she worked as Assistant Director of the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Today she is the director of Iowa City Poetry, a community arts organization sharing literary resources with writers of all ages, incomes, and identities. Her poems have appeared in Plainsongs, The Untidy Season, and Little Village. She has performed spoken word poems at a variety of shows, including Was the Word, Voicebox, The Hook, and Poetry in Motion.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Darius Stewart is recently the author of a book-length collection of poems, Intimacies in Borrowed Light, from EastOver Press, as well as the chapbooks The Ghost the Night Becomes, 2013 winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, and two titles selected for Main Street Rag's Editor's Choice Chapbook Series: Sotto Voce (2008) and The Terribly Beautiful (2006). His lyric memoir, Be Not Afraid of My Body, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing in fall 2023. Darius's poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Salamander, Verse Daily, and others. He received an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. In 2021, the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame honored him with their inaugural Emerging Writer Award. He is currently a Lulu Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Katie Runde grew up on the Jersey Shore, where her family ran boardwalk businesses. Her debut novel, The Shore, was published in May 2022 by Scribner and was an Indie Next pick, as well as a New York Times editors' choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover pick, and an Amazon editors' pick. The Shore was named a best new book by Entertainment Weekly, Shondaland, Glamour, and The Millions. She also has recent work published in LitHub and Catapult, and she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of the poetry collection Fur Not Light (2019), which The Kenyon Review called an “example of radical humility…its poems enact a quiet but persistent empathy in the world of creative writing.” Entitled Nothing of the Month Club, an expanded version of Fur Not Light was released in the United Kingdom in 2021. Recent work by Alessandrelli appears in Fence, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Review and Poetry London. Just out from the small press [PANK], his latest book is the experimental novel And Yet.

In addition to his writing Alessandrelli also directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions. He’s at https://jeffalessandrelli.net/

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Jennifer Colville is the founding editor of Prompt Press, a project connecting visual artists, book artists and writers. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Her collection of short stories Elegies for Uncanny Girls was published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. She leads writing workshops on “The Inventive Female Voice,” and at the intersection of visual art and writing . She is a co-organizer of the Free Generative Writing Workshops in Iowa City and the Executive Director of PorchLight Literary Center. Jennifer is currently at work on a novel and an essay collection.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Chad Abushanab is the author of The Last Visit, which was selected by Jericho Brown for the 2018 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Sewanee Review, The Believer, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. He is an assistant professor of English at Bemidji State University in Minnesota.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

This month we are delighted to welcome Laura Johnson, Leslie Caton Frey, and Mary Kilburg, co-founding editors of Backchannels Journal. They will lead the session by offering an original prompt and time to write and share.

Laura Johnson is an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans and is a graduate (BA, MA) of the University of Iowa. Laura’s work has appeared in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Prompt Press, and Wild Roof Journal, among others. She is a 2019 Best of Net Nominee. Laura’s chapbook, Memento Vivere (Cabin Bear Books), is available at laurajohnsonwriter.com and wherever you buy books.

Leslie Caton Frey lives and writes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her work appears in Wapsipinicon Almanac, Pank, Tupelo Quarterly, and was a notable in Best American Essays.

Mary Kilburg is an avid reader, writer and local performer who believes everyone has a story worth telling and should have a platform to share their story. She teaches English and is a Drama director/Speech coach at Metro High School in Cedar Rapids. She writes primarily memoir and poetry, as well as scripts for her students.

About Backchannels:

We are co-founding editors of Backchannels Journal. We founded the journal in 2019 and have published more than ten issues including a pandemic pop-up edition in March 2020, a small pop-up edition for Women's History Month in March 2022, a paid poetry contest in April 2021, and we have an all-LGBTQIA+ edition coming this June. We publish poetry, fiction, nonfiction, personal essay, art, and photography.

We make every attempt to: thank all submitters, respond to all submitters, never charge a submission fee, work collaboratively with contributors in the editing process, and respond personally to all submitters.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss grew up in Arkansas, received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa, and now lives and writes in Iowa City. Her poems have appeared in Timber, Slice, The Offing, Crazyhorse, the Missouri Review online, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2021 Levis Prize from Four Way Books for her manuscript The Way a Koan is an Oak, and a chapbook of poems and visual art made in collaboration with Giselle Simón is forthcoming from PromptPress. She currently serves on the advisory council for the non-profit Iowa City Poetry and as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Jennifer Colville is the founding editor of Prompt Press, a project connecting visual artists, book artists and writers. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Her collection of short stories Elegies for Uncanny Girls was published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. She leads writing workshops on “The Inventive Female Voice,” and at the intersection of visual art and writing . She is a co-organizer of the Free Generative Writing Workshops in Iowa City and the Executive Director of PorchLight Literary Center. Jennifer is currently at work on a novel and an essay collection.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. Everyone’s welcome!

Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey is an author, performer, and producer. He hails from Columbia, Missouri, and holds a B.A. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Iowa. His debut book, Look, Black Boy, became Amazon’s #1 new release in African American poetry, and was awarded first prize in the North Street Book Prize. His second book, Heart Notes was published in 2019. In 2020 and 2021 he was named Best Poet/Spoken Word Performer in Cedar Rapids & Iowa City. In 2021 he converted the poems from his first book to create his first spoken word album, Look, Black Boy. He co-founded the literary magazine Black Art; Real Stories, was published in Iowa's Best Emerging Poets - 2019, the Little Village Magazine, and wrote a monthly column for The Real Mainstream.

As a performer he is the winner of multiple poetry slams across the country, as well as a finalist for the UNESCO City of Literature Global Poetry Slam – Iowa City. He has taken the stage in countless cities, including Kansas City, Baltimore, Washington DC, Denver, Houston, Chicago, New York City, and even internationally in London, England. He was also featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now. Outside of poetry, Caleb acted in a number of plays, some of which include Blood at the Root, I and You, and the Iowa debuts Exit Strategy and Luna Gale.

When he is not writing and performing he is actively curating a community of spoken word poets in Iowa City through his creation of a high school program, IC Speaks, and producing local events like the Mic Check Poetry Festival.

This free live writing workshop will be offered hybrid, allowing you to join virtually or in person. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. To join in person, meet us on the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 Washington Street in Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Margaret MacInnis holds MFA degrees from the University of Iowa (NWP ’09) and Queens University of Charlotte (’04). Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Brevity, Diagram, Fifty-Word Stories, Fractured Literary, Ghost Parachute, Mutha Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Tiny Molecules. Longer work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast Review, Mid-American Review, River Teeth, Tampa Review and elsewhere. Nominated for three Pushcart prizes, she has received notable distinction in Best American Essays (2007, 2009, & 2011) and Best American Non-Required Reading (2009). Margaret was the 2007 William Raney Scholar in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has served on the Prose Admissions Committee for the conference. She has been a VCCA Fellow, both in Virginia and France, and was in residence at the Kimmel Nelson Center for the Arts. She has taught Introduction to Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa, where she also served as an Editorial Assistant at The Iowa Review. She currently tutors in the Writing Center at Kirkwood Community College. Since 2010 Margaret has been raising a daughter and working as Marilynne Robinson’s personal assistant.

EVENT CANCELED. STAY TUNED FOR INFORMATION ABOUT RESCHEDULING!

This free live writing workshop will be offered hybrid, allowing you to join virtually or in person. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. To join in person, meet us on the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington Street in Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Micah Ariel James is a poet, producer, playwright (Four Stories, How We Bury the War Dead, Better Weather, The Honey War), dramaturg, and teaching artist based in the Iowa City area. She is also an outreach and engagement specialist who develops and facilitates programming with an eye toward helping artists discover new approaches to creating meaningful engagement with the community, making the arts more accessible to all audiences, and building communities that are welcoming, inclusive, and equitable. Micah received an MFA in Theatre Arts (Playwriting) from the University of Iowa and a BA in Playwriting from Columbia College Chicago.

This free live writing workshop will be offered hybrid, allowing you to join virtually or in person. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. To join in person, meet us on the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 Washington Street in Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

How can we stop and bear witness to the earth at this critical moment in history? Can we re-engage our senses and sensitivity to the natural world through words? This edition of The Free Generative Writing Workshops presents a call first put forth by inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, a "Prompt for the Planet." Join writing instructor Jennifer Colville as she walks you through approaches to Amanda's prompt.

Jennifer Colville is the founding editor of Prompt Press, a project connecting visual artists, book artists and writers. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Elegies for Uncanny Girls, a collection of short stories, was published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. Jennifer leads creative writing workshops, and speaks on “The Inventive Female Voice,” and the intersection of writing and visual art. She directs PorchLight, a space for fostering community through the literary arts.

Join this free online writing workshop by registering here. After registering, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. Everyone’s welcome!

Adam Knight is in his third season as Producing Artistic Director at Riverside Theatre, Iowa City's professional resident theatre. He was founder and co-Artistic Director of Slant Theatre Project, an Off Off-Broadway company that produced more than two dozen world premieres and also served as Executive Director of Red Lab, an international collective dedicated to cultural diplomacy through performance. As director, Adam has developed new works by Lucy Alibar, Lasha Bugadze, Bekah Brunstetter, Matt Dellapina, Lawrence Dial, Michele Lowe, David Lee Nelson, Mat Smart, and Rinat Tashimov, among others, at venues such as Ars Nova, 59E59, Poetry Project, Primary Stages, P.S.122, The Lark, Vineyard Arts Project, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Pure Theatre, Warehouse Theatre, and Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Join this free online writing workshop by registering here. After registering, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. Everyone’s welcome!

Noelia Cerna is a Latina poet based in Northwest Arkansas. She was born in Costa Rica and immigrated to the United States at the age of 7 and received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Westminster College in Missouri. Her poems have been published in audio form in Terse. Journal, The Revolution [Relaunch], The North Meridian Review and the Plants and Poetry Journal. Noelia is the Program Coordinator for the Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE), a reader and poetry feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, an assistant poetry editor for Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, an associate editor for Sibling Rivalry Press, an editor for Nomadic Press, a poetry genre editor for Patchwork Lit Mag, a writing mentor for Pen America’s Prison Writing Mentorship Program and a recent recipient of the PEN America L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, the board president and director of the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective, and a writer for Powerful Latinas Rising.

Join this free online writing workshop by registering here. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. Everyone’s welcome!

Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 New American Press Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a PhD from Western Michigan University, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Join this free online sonnet writing workshop, “Reimagining the Sonnet,” by registering here. The Zoom link will then be sent to you. Everyone’s welcome in this 90 minute program, jointly sponsored by Riverside Theatre and the Free Generative Writing Workshops.

Dora Malech is the author of Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press, 2009). Eris Press (Urtext Ltd) published Soundings, a selection of poems from Malech's first three books and a selection of her visual artwork, in 2019. A chapbook of her poetry titled Time Trying was recently commissioned for the anthology Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic (Tupelo Press, 2020).

Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry International, and The Best American Poetry. Her lyrical collaborations with composer Jacob Cooper have appeared on both of his albums, Terrain (New Amsterdam Records, 2020) and Silver Threads (Nonesuch Records, 2014), and her libretto for Cooper and director Karmina Šilec’s opera Threnos: for the Throat had its world premiere at Operadagen Rotterdam in 2020, performed by the Carmina Slovenica choir. With Laura T. Smith, she is currently co-editing a collection of American sonnets and essays on the American sonnet tradition, under contract with the University of Iowa Press.

Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Fund, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize from the Baker Artist Awards, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and she has been the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome through its Visiting Artists and Scholars Program. She is a co-founder and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Having taught at institutions that include the University of Iowa, Augustana College in Illinois, and the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, she is now an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she has received a Crenson-Hertz Award for Community Based Learning and Participatory Research, two Arts Innovation Grants, a Dean's Award for Excellence in Service, and a Catalyst Award for early career faculty. She serves on the advisory board of Writers in Baltimore Schools and as an associate editor of The Waywiser Press and Tupelo Quarterly.

Join this online workshop by emailing iowacitypoetry@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. Everyone’s welcome!

Jorrell Watkins is a writer and martial artist from Richmond, VA. He is a 2020-21 Fulbright Grant Award recipient for Japan, an alum of Hampshire College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His disability inclusive play, Meet us at the Horizon, was produced by Combined Efforts Co. for its 2019 world premiere. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as winner of the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry.

Join this online workshop by emailing iowacitypoetry@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. Everyone’s welcome!

Micky Bayonne is a poet and educator whose work explores themes of identity, place, disaster, and ecology. Originally from Louisiana, they hold an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Poetry. Micky is the current Provost Visiting Writer in Poetry at the University of Iowa.

Join this online workshop by emailing iowacitypoetry@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. Everyone’s welcome!

Megan Gogerty is a playwright and comedian. Her solo show Lady Macbeth and Her Pal, Megan played the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won the Audience Pick of the Fringe at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Her play Bad Panda (Theatre Without Borders, Beijing; Iron Crow Theatre Co.; WordBRIDGE Boomerang Playwright honoree) is published by Original Works Publishing and was translated into Spanish for a five-month run at Del Teatro Milan in Mexico City. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed her solo show Hillary Clinton Got Me Pregnant in their yearly Top Ten Best Plays. Megan’s musical drama Love Jerry was produced in the New York Musical Theatre Festival where it won three Talkin’ Broadway Citations and four NYMF Excellence Awards including Excellence in Writing (Book). Her ten-minute play Rumple Schmumple (Dramatic Pub.) was a Kennedy Center/National ACTF honoree. Other plays include: FEAST. (Riverside Theatre, Know Theatre of Cincinnati); Housebroken (Riverside Theatre, Hollins University); Save Me, Dolly Parton (Riverside Theatre, Synchronicity Theatre; named among Best Plays in Atlanta by Creative Loafing). Her musical tribute album to the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer is widely available online. Megan was a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, a WordBRIDGE alum, and she earned her MFA in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches playwriting at the University of Iowa and is a regularly returning visiting faculty for the Playwright's Lab at Hollins University.

Join this online workshop by emailing iowacitypoetry@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. Everyone’s welcome!

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in early 2021 and the chapbook Visionware, available from Finishing Line Press 2009). She is a Contributing Editor of Grabbed: Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press 2020) and Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day. Moro-Gronlier is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, The Best of the Net and two Lambda Literary Awards. Her recent work can be found at The Best American Poetry Blog, West Trestle Review, Literary Mama, Fantastical Florida and others. A career educator, she is an English professor at FIU and MDC in Miami, FL where she resides with her wife and son.

Join this online workshop by emailing iowacitypoetry@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. Everyone’s welcome!

Claretta Holsey is a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow and a Literary Translation Graduate Certificate candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A three-time awardee of the Academy of American Poets prize, she recently graduated summa cum laude with a BA from Stetson University. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in Eclectica Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, Fishfood Magazine, and on Poets.org and PromptPress. She has read for The Iowa Review and is reading for the microjournal Black Poetry Review.

Join this online workshop by emailing iowacitypoetry@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. Everyone’s welcome!

Valerie Wetlaufer is the author of two poetry collections: Call Me by My Other Name, and the Lambda Award-winning Mysterious Acts by My People. She teaches at Mount Mercy University.