Events Calendar

Join us for the International Writing Program's Prairie Lights Reading Series this Sunday to hear readings by three 2023 Fall Residency writers and four IWP program alumni.

Pola Oloixarac is the author of the novels Las teorías salvajes (2008), Las constelaciones oscuras (2015) and Mona (2019), all available in English (Soho Press, FSG), and of the collection of political essay "Galería de celebridades argentinas" (2023). She has written the opera libretto Hercules in Mato Grosso, premiered in Buenos Aires (2014) and New York City (2015), contributed articles on politics and culture for The New York Times, the BBC and elsewhere, and is currently a columnist at La Nación. A co-founder and editor of The Buenos Aires Review, which features contemporary literature in the Americas, she was in 2010 named among Granta’s “Best Young Spanish Novelists.” A recipient of the national award for literature from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, as well as, in 2019, of the British Library’s Eccles and Hay Festival prizes, she had Savage Theories nominated for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award; her work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2023, she was an Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa.

Tade Ipadeola is a Nigerian poet, essayist, storyteller, translator, and lawyer. The recipient of many awards for both prose and poetry, he writes in both Yoruba and English. Among his main publications are three volumes of poetry—A Time of Signs (2000), The Rain Fardel (2005) and The Sahara Testaments (2013), the last of which won the Nigeria Prize for Literature; his latest collection is Cold Brew (2023). In 2009, his poem “Odidere” [Songbird] won the Delphic Laurel in poetry at the Delphic Games held in Jeju, South Korea. He has translated the novelist Daniel Fagunwa from the Yoruba, and W.H Auden, Tomas Tranströmer and Lu Xun into Yoruba.

Mary Rokonadravu (fiction, nonfiction, prose poetry; Fiji) creates stories, poetry, and literary nonfiction inspired by art, history, and science. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific region) in 2017, she won it in 2015 and in 2022. Her work has been published in Granta, adda, and Synkretic, and anthologized by the University of London Press and Penguin Random House; she is now working on a novel. Her participation is supported by the U.S. State Department through its Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Esther Dischereit was born in Heppenheim, Germany, and lives in Berlin. In its many different forms, her work presents a visceral pathography of post-​war continuities, crises, spectres and trauma. She has published fiction, poetry, journalism and essays, and is a prolific writer for the radio, the stage and other artistic media. Between 2012 and 2017 she was Professor of Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She has been a Fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European and Jewish Studies in Potsdam and the DAAD Chair for Contemporary Poetics at New York University, 2019. In 2009 she received Austria`s prestigious Erich Fried Prize for her writing. Her latest work: Exhibition on Who Was Fritz Kittel? A Reichsbahn Railroad Worker Makes a Decision, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main et. al, 2023

Moon Bo Young (poet, novelist, essayist; South Korea) made her debut in 2016, winning the Joongang New Literary Award and the Kim Soo Young Prize for her first poetry collection, translated into English in 2021 as Pillar of Books. She has since published two more volumes of poetry and several volumes of fiction and essays; beyond print, she distributes her writing through other media—snail mail, radio, phone, and more. Currently, she is teaching at the Seoul Arts University. Her participation was made possible by a grant from Arts Council Korea (ARKO).

Tzveta Sofronieva (poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist; Germany/Bulgaria), a physicist and historian of science by training, is the author of over 20 books, including Multiverse (2020), a collection of new and selected poems written originally in German, Bulgarian and English and A Hand Full of Water (2012), translated from the German, the recipient of a 2009 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and the 2012 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Her poetry has been translated into 19 languages; her theater work has been supported by Bulgaria’s National Cultural Fund. She participates courtesy of the Max Kade Foundation.

Efe Duyan (poet, architect, event curator) was born in Istanbul in 1981. As an internationally recognized poet, he has been invited to numerous international events, including the Hurst Professorship at St. Louis University and IWP at the University of Iowa. His poems have been translated to over 25 different languages. His debut novel Other is published in Turkish in 2022 and his selected poems The Behaviour of Words is published by White Pine Press in New York in 2023. As an advocate of freedom of expression and creative thinking, he has been an active cultural actor curating international events, workshops and conferences. He is currently teaching architecture in Riga.

Esther Dischereit photo copyright Sandro Most. Tade Ipadeola copyright Benjamin Amodu. Efe Duyan photo copyright David Konecny and Efe Duyan.