Featured Interviews
Damon Gray, Screenwriting Arts
5Q Interview: Damon Gray, current student in the Screenwriting Arts BA Program
University of Iowa Press Author Joseph G. Peterson
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Joseph G. Peterson
Full Collection
5Q Interview: Hyukin Michaela KWON, IWP Resident from South Korea
Friday, September 12, 2025
"I love experimenting with and blending different forms of art and genres. So you'll find theatrical elements in my audiovisual works and multimedia elements in my stage works."
5Q Interview: Ndongolera C. Mwangupili, IWP Resident from Malawi
Friday, September 5, 2025
"I write to depict the reality in my country. My philosophy as a writer is that I write to liberate and enlighten my people."
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Andrew Brininstool
Friday, August 8, 2025
"As macabre as it may sound, I spent countless days listening to them discuss true crime, the criminal justice system—and the riot in particular: who they knew, what had happened, theories about why."
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Darrell Kinsey
Monday, July 28, 2025
"The novel covers the brief and tragic episode of their relationship, their hardscrabble existence and their attempt to start a family."
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Mackenzie Kozak
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
"I found inspiration for this book through my own process of sitting in spaces of ambivalence over the question of whether or not to mother."
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Joseph G. Peterson
Monday, July 7, 2025
"I found myself reflecting on the dilemma that artists who pen memoirs must face when writing explicitly about actual people whom they had sexual relations with."
5Q Interview: Damon Gray, current student in the Screenwriting Arts BA Program
Thursday, June 26, 2025
"I love how the university's campus is integrated into downtown. When I noticed this during my orientation, it made everything so much more lively."
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Tom Mitchell
Thursday, June 19, 2025
"As editor, I gathered the stories from collections of Williams works at the University of Texas and Harvard University. The process of editing included sifting through Williams’s original notes and revisions to ascertain the most effective telling of each story."
5Q Interview: William Pei Shih, instructor at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival
Thursday, June 19, 2025
"I’ve been teaching a course called the Award-Winning Short Story, which is a workshop where we’ve been studying some of the guidelines of what might make a story stand out..."
5Q Interview: Stephanie Krzywonos, MFA Graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
"I am not a daily writer. I am a marathon writer. I prefer large, uninterrupted chunks of time to fully immerse myself and get into a flow."
5Q Interview: University of Iowa Press Author Aidan Ryan
Monday, June 2, 2025
"I gave Cindy's eulogy—I was 18 years old—and the job never quite felt finished."
5Q Interview: Heidie Senseman, MFA Candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
"I’m working on a collection of essays about faith, art, and conversion—more specifically, about the way devotional art can act as a sort of vehicle for “translating” religious ideas into a vocabulary that’s more hospitable to secular audiences."
5Q Interview: Bethany Kaylor, MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
"Giving myself permission to experiment with something new—like writing an essay in the form of dictionary entries modeled after Bob Flanagan's The Book of Medicine—is so exciting and invigorating."
5Q Interview: Connor French, Undergrauate in Cinema and Screenwriting Arts
Monday, May 5, 2025
"I knew in high school that I wanted to study Cinema and Screenwriting, so I was looking for a university with a rigorous writing program, in a location that would foster my love for art."
5Q Interview: Emma Athena Murray, MFA Candidate in Literary Translation
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
"I was thrilled to come to the University of Iowa and join the awesomely diverse writing communities here (poets! novelists! essayists! comic writers!)"
5Q Interview: Kendin Scheitlin, a UI Undergraduate Majoring in Cinema
Thursday, April 24, 2025
"Being able to create art or write about something that directly relates to the world around me currently makes me feel like I have a special place in history."
5Q Interview: Miharu Yano, MFA candidate in the Translation Workshop
Monday, April 21, 2025
"Translation is a craft that requires a lot of discipline and focus, and I usually try to find large chunks of time (4+ hours) rather than small increments."
5Q Interview: Fion Tse, MFA candidate in the Literary Translation
Thursday, April 17, 2025
"For me, the biggest source of inspiration for any translation project I’m working on is the source text itself! Translation forces you to read intimately, and you have to be quite intimate to rewrite the text in a different language."
5Q Interview: Lydia Meth, Cinematic and Screenwriting Arts
Monday, April 14, 2025
"...the entire city seemed to glow and support its students. I fell in love with the literary walk downtown and the numerous cafes that undoubtedly housed so many aspiring writers."
5Q Interview: Grace Morse, MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program
Monday, April 7, 2025
"I am a near-daily journal-er; it's my precious, private place. Writing at night is akin to glory for me these days, and I love to light candles and enter my body in an extra-intentional way."
5Q Interview: Alan Valdez, MFA Candidate at the Spanish Creative Writing Program
Thursday, April 3, 2025
"And then I wake up, open the windows, make my coffee, think about places I’ve been and people I’ve loved. I send good morning messages, sometimes I teach Spanish classes, sometimes I go to the store to buy food for the week."
5Q Interview: Irene Rodrigo, MFA Candidate in the Spanish Creative Writing Program
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
"... lately I’m getting to discover how useful can be for me to write outside from home. Some days I go to the public library of Iowa City, where I can find the silence I need to edit my texts or keep writing them. Some other days I go to cafés ..."
5Q Interview: Jessica Alexander, an instructor at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival
Thursday, March 13, 2025
"If you can make a single sentence do the work of 3 sentences or a paragraph—then, you’ve probably written a compelling sentence. In flash every word communicates."
5Q Interview: Laura Jaramillo, instructor at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival
Friday, March 7, 2025
"This course gives you the opportunity to intensely focus on the visual aspects of writing poetry and how they affect the ways we understand poetry."
5Q Interview: Kat O'Brien, instructor at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival
Thursday, March 6, 2025
"...I'll be sharing my top-secret tips and tricks that I love to tell everyone for how to blast past obstacles on the page, and embrace all the joy in your creative process."
5Q Interview: Spencer Lane Jones, an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program
Monday, February 10, 2025
"I became an early bird writer because I had to be, and it hasn't really left my body."
5Q Interview: UI Press Author Erika Morillo
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
"In this image-text memoir, I create an archive out of a myriad of sources: family photographs, images I’ve made, news clippings, videos, and conversations. "
5Q Interview: Solenn Vincent, editor of The Broken Clock Magazine
Friday, November 22, 2024
"Broken Clock is unique in the fact that it focuses on time. This can be as specific or as vague in the submissions as the contributors would like, but all the pieces are centered around a specific topic within time."
