Events Calendar

Between the Lines: Peace and the Writing Experience Faculty Reading

July 18, 2021 - 8:00am

Prairie Lights Virtual - Zoom

Join IWP online for a reading with acclaimed writers from North Macedonia, Pakistan, Bulgaria, and the U.S. all in one (free) session through  Prairie Lights Bookstore!

These four authors – Rumena Bužarovska (IWP Fall Resident ’18 #NorthMacedonia,   U.S. Embassy North Macedonia), Mary Hickman (U.S.), Shandana Minhas (FR ’13 #Pakistan,   U.S. Embassy Pakistan), Vladimir Poleganov (FR ’16 #Bulgaria,   U.S. Embassy Sofia)– are current faculty for IWP’s online session of   Between the Lines: Peace and the Writing Experience, an exchange and creative writing program for students ages 15-18 supported through a cooperative agreement between the IWP,   Exchange Programs - U.S. Department of State, and   University of Iowa. #exchangeourworld

Please register here sooner rather than later, as space is limited.

Rumena Bužarovska (1981, Skopje, North Macedonia) has authored four short story collections in Macedonian as well as a study on humor in contemporary American and Macedonian short fiction. She is a literary translator from English into Macedonian, having translated author such as J.M Coetzee, Lewis Carroll and Truman Capote,. In 2016 she was selected as one of the Ten New Voices of Europe by Literary Europe Live platform within Literature Across Frontiers, she is the 2017 winner of the regional Edo Budiša prize awarded by the Istria County in Croatia, and is the recipient of the 2018 Fall Residency at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is co-initiator and co-organizer of the Peach Preach women’s storytelling event in North Macedonia and associate professor of American literature at the State University in Skopje.

Mary Hickman was born in Idaho and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Hickman is the author of two books of poems, This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Rayfish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), which won the James Laughlin Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and chosen by Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, and Carmen Giménez Smith. An assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, she also teaches in (and loves!) the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program.

Shandana Minhas is the author of the novels ‘Tunnel Vision’,‘Survival Tips for Lunatics’,‘Daddy’s Boy’ and the novella 'Rafina’. Her essays, columns and short fiction have appeared in publications including EPW, Herald, IQ, and the Griffith Review. Her work has been adapted for theatre and cinema. She was an IWP fellow in 2013 and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

Vladimir Poleganov (b. 1979, Sofia) is a Bulgarian writer, translator, and screenwriter. He is the author of one collection of short stories, The Deconstruction of Thomas S (published in 2013 by St. Kliment Ohridski University Press) and one novel, The Other Dream (2016, Colibri), which won the Helikon Award for Best Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. “The Birds”, a short story, was featured in Dalkey Archive Press’ anthology Best European Fiction 2016. In 2016, he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This was followed by residencies in Shanghai and Sun Yat-sen University in China. He has translated novels by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Octavia E. Butler, and Peter Beagle into Bulgarian. In 2020, his translation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo won the Association of Bulgarian Translators Prize. He is currently working on a PhD in Bulgarian literature at Sofia University where he also teaches courses on creative writing and fantastic literature.