Events Calendar

Sundays this fall: The International Writing Program (IWP) and UI MFA writing programs take over the 2nd floor of Prairie Lights – grab a glass of wine or a fancy soda and settle in for an hour of highlights from their best work!
Reading Sept. 23: 
Siyanda Mohutsiwa (Botswana) is an internationally recognized satirist and speaker. Her satirical hashtag #IfAfricaWasABar went viral in the summer of 2015, leading to her 2015 TedTalk titled "Is Africa's Future Online?" and another in 2016 titled "How young Africans found a voice on Twitter" in February 2016. Mohutsiwa describes herself as a pan-Africanist. Her work has been featured on BBC and has been published internationally. She is currently an MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Fiction.
IWP 2018 Fall Residents:
Gina COLE (fiction writer, poet; New Zealand) is the author of Black Ice Matter, which won Best First Book of Fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and the winner of the 2014 Auckland Pride Festival’s creative writing competition for the poem “Airport Aubade”; her work is widely anthologized.  She was keynote speaker at the 2017 Auckland Writers Festival and the Same Same But Different LGBTQIA+ Writing Festival.  A barrister, she specializes in family law. Her participation in the IWP Fall Residency is made possible by Creative New Zealand.
Tehila HAKIMI  (poet, fiction writer; Israel) writes poetry, fiction and graphic novels. Her poetry volume [We’ll Work Tomorrow] (2014) received the 2015 Bernstein Prize for Literature, and, alongside her graphic novel [In the Water], the Yehoshua Rabinowitz Foundation Prize for Literature. Hakimi received the 2014 Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for Emerging Poets. She works as a mechanical engineer. Her participation in the IWP Fall Residency is made possible by the United States-Israel Educational Foundation.