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.

Yashika Graham (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual artist; Jamaica), the winner of the 2019 Mervyn Morris Prize for Poetry, has also received a Centrum Writer’s Residency and read at literary festivals including Dodge Poetry (USA), Bristol (UK), the World Festival of Poetry (Venezuela) and Port Townsend (USA). Her poetry, prose, and literary criticism have been published internationally; her debut collection Some of Us Can Go Back Home is forthcoming from Blouse & Skirt Books. She participates courtesy a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Li Kotomi (novelist, essayist, translator; Taiwan/Japan) is the author of Hitorimai, published in 2022 as Solo Dance, Porarisu ga furisosogu yoru [Night of the Shining North Star] (2020), and Higanbana ga saku shima [The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom] (2021). She is the winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists, both awarded in Japan, where she is currently based. She writes in Japanese, self-translating her work into Mandarin. Her participation was made possible by a grant from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture.

Derick Edgren Otero is a third-year MFA candidate in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Graduate Assistant for the International Writing Program, President of the Latinx Graduate Student Association at the University of Iowa, and the Graduate Student Representative for the Latinx, Indigenous, and Americas Focus Group at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Most recently a 2023 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat Playwriting Fellow and recipient of the KCACTF Region V Latinx Playwriting Award, their bilingual play Mother:Knife, developed with La MaMa Umbria, premiered in the University of Iowa’s Gallery Series in October 2022. A thesis production is forthcoming in the Iowa New Play Festival in early May 2024.