“Writing the World”: UI Graduate College Highlights the IWP

November 19, 2009

This University of Iowa Graduate College article highlights the International Writing Program and its director Christopher Merrill:

"At age 6, Christopher Merrill began a brief but lucrative career as a newspaper publisher. His first story was about a young girl who shared the same wing of the hospital as he did and was dying of leukemia. "I remember writing a story about her. I sold them to my neighbors for one penny apiece," Merrill said. "I had to copy out each one, so it didn't last very long." While his newspaper career stopped before it ever really started, Merrill has never quit writing. From his office at Shambaugh House, where he has been director of The University of Iowa's International Writing Program since 2000, to a basement in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, during the Bosnian War, Merrill has used the written word to explain his life's journey." read more...

Poetry | Faculty | International Writing Program
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UIMA ‘Word Painter’ Readings Feature Nonfiction Participants

November 11, 2009

As part of the ongoing series of "Word Painter" readings, the University of Iowa Museum of Art will be hosting events this year in the Old Capitol Museum's Senate Chamber. On Thursday, Nov. 5, Janet Hendrickson, a graduate student in the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and one of the UI Museum of Art's Fall 2009 "Word Painter" fellows, and Robin Hemley, Iowa Writers' Workshop alumnus and director of the UI Nonfiction Writing Program, read from their recent works.

Created in the fall of 2006 to foster writing about the visual arts, the UIMA's collaborative writing program invites four UI Nonfiction Writing Program Master of Fine Arts candidates to think critically about the intersection of art and life. UIMA "Word Painters" receive an honorarium to work on writing projects, including an art-based essay, and they read from their work throughout the academic year alongside well-known writers from the faculty of the UI's famed writing programs.Read more...

Nonfiction Writing Program | UI Museum of Art
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Poets & Writers Magazine Ranks Iowa #1

October 29, 2009

The University of Iowa creative writing programs in fiction, poetry and nonfiction were individually and collectively ranked number one by Poets & Writers magazine in their "Top Fifty" list of Master of Fine Arts programs.

The list was compiled on the basis of a poll of more than 500 MFA current and prospective MFA applicants between October 2008 and April 2009. "All poll respondents were asked to list, along with their genre of interest, either the programs to which they planned to apply, or, if they were not yet applicants but expected to be in the future, which programs they believed were the strongest in the nation," Seth Abramson, wrote.

Poets & Writers, Inc. is the primary source of information, support and guidance for creative writers. Founded in 1970, it is the nation's largest nonprofit literary organization serving poets, fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers. Read more...

Iowa Writers' Workshop | Fiction | Poetry | Nonfiction
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Second Life Readings Presented by the UI Grad College and IWP

October 28, 2009

Alice Pung is nearly 10,000 miles away from home as an International Writing Program participant at the University of Iowa.

But through Second Life (a 3-D virtual world where users can socialize, customize an avatar, connect and create using free voice and text chats) friends and family in her native Melbourne, Australia, had the opportunity to hear her read from her memoir, "Unpolished Gem" on Oct. 21.

Students in the UI's School of Library of Information Science (SLIS) graduate program developed avatars -- characters that you can personalize and use when interacting with friends online -- for themselves and the writers, and coordinated the readings with the avatars at the main library.

SLIS students will be hosting another Second Life presentation at 2 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30, with IWP participants Yasser Abdel Latif of Egypt and Maxine Case of South Africa reading from their work. Representatives of the UI's Virtual Writing University are helping produce the events.
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International Writing Program | New Media | UI Libraries
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UI Press Marks 150th Anniversary of ‘Leaves of Grass’ with Facsimile Edition

October 19, 2009

The University of Iowa Press will release "Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition" this autumn in honor of the 150th Anniversary of the collection's publication. This anniversary edition will include not only a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume but also an introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy -- a faculty member at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville -- that situates Whitman in 19th-century America as well as annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman's poems.

The book is part of the ongoing Iowa Whitman Series that celebrates and explores his influence on modern and contemporary writers in America and around the world. Robert Roper, author of "Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War," wrote, "The University of Iowa Press continues its indispensable service to Whitman scholarship with this new edition of the 1860 'Leaves of Grass.' Jason Stacy refrains from calling the 1860 edition the greatest of all the editions that Whitman published in his lifetime, so we will have to do it for him: Those that came before were smaller, while those that came after represent fallings-away from this towering and encompassing enchantment, the greatest book yet from an American poet." read more...

Poetry | UI Press
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