Events Calendar

Join us for the International Writing Program's Prairie Lights Reading Series this Sunday to hear readings by two 2023 Fall Residency writers and one University of Iowa MFA student.

Soonest Nathaniel (poet, spoken-word artist; Nigeria) is the author of the mixed-genre volume Burying the Ghosts of Dead Narratives (2022) and the poetry collection Teaching Father How to Impregnate Women (2018). The winner of the 2017 RL Poetry Award and many Nigerian poetry and spoken-word competitions, he was named a Langston Hughes Fellow at the Palm Beach Festival and served as the Poet Laureate for the Korea Nigeria Poetry Festival; his poems appear in Nigerian, U.S. and British magazines. He participates thanks to a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Kevin Chen (novelist; Taiwan) started his career as a stage and screen actor. He is also the author of 10 novels and short story collections, which have garnered him several literary awards in Taiwan. Ghost Town, in Darryl Sterk’s translation, among Library Journal’s Best Books of World Literature 2022, was longlisted for PEN’s 2023 Translation Prize and will be translated into 11 languages. Chen lives in Berlin, where he long was foreign correspondent for Taiwanese TV. His participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Hajrije Kolimja is an Albanian-born writer raised in the Midwest. She is the recipient of a Fulbright research and writing grant to Albania, where she created the country’s first youth writing program and online writing lab. She holds an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is at work on a novel and short stories.