Events Calendar

Join us at the Shambaugh House (430 N. Clinton St, Iowa City) for a reading by three IWP 2024 Fall Residency writers.

Mélanie Werder-Avilés (playwright, theatremaker, scholar; Spain) is the author of the plays *Buena suerte, chica; Sharenting; Nutella Days; and Tiradísimo de Precio [Dirt-cheap]; among others. Her play La Protagonista won the Lope de Vega award. She has been selected as a resident playwright at the Spanish National Drama Centre and has been a member of the International Summer Workshop at the Sala Beckett. She has been awarded the Carlota Soldevila Fellowship by the Teatre Lliure de Barcelona and is a member of the SGAE Playwriting Laboratory and the ETC of Contemporary Creation at the Sala Cuarta Pared in Madrid, among others. She is currently researching documentary theatre practices as a predoctoral fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her participation was made possible by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C., and supplemental monies from the IWP.

Han Junghyun (fiction writer; South Korea) is a novelist. Her debut short novel [The Language of Adolf and Albert] won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer’s Contest in 2015. In 2019, she won the Today's Writer Award for her novel [Juliana Tokyo]. In 2020, she won the Young Writer's Award and the Queer Literature Award for her queer romance [Our Wish is a Science Boy]. In 2021, she won the Kim Yu Jeong Literature Award and the BUMA Democratic Uprising Literary Award for [Kyoko and Kyoji]. Her participation was made possible by a grant from Arts Council Korea (ARKO).

Zakariya Amataya (poet, editor, translator; Thailand) won the 2010 S.E.A. Write Award for his first poetry collection, No Women in Poetry. He followed with a second collection, [But in Us It Is Deep as the Sea], in 2013. After 25 years in Bangkok and India, Amataya returned home to Narathiwat in 2016 to write poems and stories about the southern Thai borderlands and to co-found a journal called The Melayu Review. His third poetry collection, due out in 2024, is called Posthumous Poems from Paradise. His participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.