was born in 1953 in Sudan, where he worked as a teacher, freelance musician, activist and journalist (where he wrote on culture and politics for various newspapers and magazines). He has co-authored a book on traditional Sudanese musical instruments and composed music for two films. In 1991 he went into exile, and lived in Russia and Egypt before coming to the United States as a refugee in 1996.
is the author of nine novels, one volume of short stories, and one collection of essays. Born in Chile, he lived in Cuba, East Germany, West Germany, and Sweden before coming to the United States in 2000. He was an IWP fellow in 1996, and earned his master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Iowa, where he now teaches Latin American literature and creative writing and leads a Spanish-language fiction workshop. He also writes columns for La Tercera and the New York Times Syndicate. His work has been published throughout Latin America as well as in Croatia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the US. His last novel, Pasiones griegas, was voted “Best Novel Published In Spanish In 2006” by the National People’s Publishing House of China and the Association of Chinese Hispanists. Currently he is working on a novel to be released in 2008.
was born in San Luís Jilotepeque, Jalapa, Guatemala, in 1954. At the age of 7 he was taught the art of tailoring by his uncles, and from his maternal grandmother he learned Mayan mythology and a long list of refrains and sayings. He graduated as a teacher from INCAV, and in the early 1980s studied fashion merchandising in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2000 he published the book Nostalgia. At present he is the director and publisher of El Heraldo Hispano, a biweekly Spanish newspaper with a circulation of 6,000 distributed in 26 towns in Iowa and Illinois. Father of nine and grandfather of six, he has resided in Mount Pleasant, Iowa since September 1999. In 2006 he was named by former Governor Thomas Vilsack to serve as a commissioner on the Iowa Commission of Latino Affairs.
just left the presidency of Americans for UNESCO; previously he headed the American Fulbright Association of US alumni. He served for 24 years in the Near East, South Asia and Europe with the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency, principally as Cultural Attache in Beirut, Colombo (Sir Lanka), Tehran, Rome, and Paris. He presently chairs the US Committee for the Preservation of Ancient Tyre. His major book The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the 20th Century appeared in 2005 and in paperback in 2006; in 1993 he was principal editor of The Fulbright Difference: 1947-92. He holds a Ph.D. in French literature (18th century) from Columbia University, where he taught until 1961. Since leaving the Foreign Service, he has taught at the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington University. He has seven grandchildren.
recently retired from her position as associate dean of the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. While at UI, she also was a professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, specializing in African literatures. She has held offices in the African Literature Association and the African Studies Association, and also served as Interim Director of the International Writing Program and Executive Director of the Honors Program.
is the author of 18 volumes of poetry and essays. His honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He is a long-time member of the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he is the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. He has twice been named Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa.
came to the IWP in 1968 and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He taught Asian Studies at the University of Iowa, then at Yale for over twenty years. Recently retired from Yale, he is now teaching poetry at Hong Kong University. He has published several volumes of poetry, and is widely considered the modern Li Po. Like the Tang poet, he believes in the enjoyment of life: poetry, nature, and drinking. Musicality is prominent in his Chinese-language poetry. He is a frequent traveler, as demonstrated by his line: "I am a passer-by, not a returned man." (Photo from Iowa City, early 1970s)
was born in 1933 in Sulina, Romania, of Greek parents. He attended the Greek community schools of Sulina and Bucharest before emigrating to Greece after WWII. From 1947-1957 he lived with his parents in a 2,000-inmate refugee camp while also finishing his secondary education and graduating from the National University of Athens. He studied English and American literature at Yale on a Fulbright scholarship, and Comparative Literature, Classics, Old and Middle English at the University of California at Berkeley. Between 1965 and 1996 he taught in the English and Cinema and Comparative Literatures departments at the University of Iowa. He has received numerous research awards, and his publications include books and articles in scholarly journals, as well as performance and intermedia art projects.
is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. He has served as a journalist and producer at the African Broadcasting Union (URTNA) in Nairobi, Kenya, and at Cameroon Radio and Television Corporation. He has produced several video documentaries on African topics, three of which have won honorable mention at festivals in Germany and Canada. His research has been published in many journals, including The International Journal of Communication Law and Policy, Journal for Journalism in Southern Africa (Ecquid Novi), and the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications.
is an editor of Words Without Borders and a a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. She reads several languages and helped found The Front Table, a book- review web publication.
is an actor and playwright and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Iowa. He is noted for producing locally popular plays on Limerick history. His best known play, Pigtown (1999), covers the forgotten moments in 20th-century Limerick history from the point of view of a dying man. Mike Finn's other plays include The Crunch (1992), Charlie Chaplin's Mother Was An Irish Man (1995) (both co-written with Terry Devlin), The Quiet Moment (2002) (read in London, March 06), Shock and Awe (2003), Ellis Island (2003) and ONE (2006). He also writes the Irish television sitcom Killinaskully for Pat Shortt Productions.
represented the Second District of Iowa in the U.S. Congress from 1977 to 2007. He is currently on the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, serving as the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs and Co. Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs. Recently he was named the interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
is a literary heavyweight in Chinese writing today. He has published several books of novels and short stories. He became best known for a series of stories published under the title Houtu (Thick Earth), which won the China Times Literary Prize and gained him a reputation across the Taiwan Straits. One of his novels, Tale of Silver City, consists of stories of individuals who were either pro- or anti-revolution at the end of Imperial China, and for whom their common fate was death. Many of his works have been translated into Swedish, English, French, Japanese, German, Dutch, and other languages.
graduated with an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and is currently managing editor of Zephyr Press, co-director of the series Adventures in Poetry, and translation editor for the Zoland Poetry annual. His translations from the Russian include Dmitrii Prigov’s 50 Drops of Blood in an Absorbent Medium (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the forthcoming Eccentric Circles: Selected Prose of Venedikt Erofeev (Twisted Spoon Press). He also edited Bei Dao’s first two books of essays, Blue House (Zephyr Press) and Midnight’s Gate (New Directions).
is a professor of English and African-American literature at the University of Northern Iowa, where, in 2005, he was named the Dr. Philip G. Hubbard Outstanding Educator. A native of Rwanda, he specializes in African and African diaspora literatures. His most recent book is The Dark Heathenism of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo as Americas Literary HooDoo (Edwin Mellen, 2007).
is the founder and managing editor of The Complete Review and its popular weblog, The Literary Saloon, both of which focus on international writing. A native of Austria, he attended Columbia Law School and is also an attorney in New York City.
is the director of Open Letter, a new publishing venture at the University of Rochester dedicated to publishing quality fiction from around the world. He is also the co-founder of Reading the World—a collaborative program designed to help publishers and booksellers promote literature in translation—and was formerly the associate director of Dalkey Archive Press.
Tomaz Šalamun was born in Zagreb, Croatia, raised in Koper, Slovenia, and now makes his home in Ljubljana. He studied art history and worked as a curator and a conceptual artist before turning to the written word. Having published 25 volumes of poems in his native Yugoslavia/Slovenia, Šalamun has received many prizes in Europe and been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The Selected Poems of Tomaz Šalamun, edited and in large part translated by Charles Simic, was the poet's debut collection in English, brought out in 1988 as part of Ecco Press's prestigious Modern European Poetry series. It was followed by The Shepherd, The Hunter (Pedernal, 1992), The Four Questions Of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997), Feast (Harcourt, 2000), and The Book for My Brother (Harvest Books, 2006).
Ersi Sotiropoulos is a Greek poet, novelist, and short story writer. Her novel, Zigzag through the Bitter Orange Trees, was awarded both the National Literature Prize and the Book Critics' Award in 2000, and was published in English in 2007 by Interlink Press. She has written scripts for film and television and participated in several exhibitions of visual and concrete poetry.
Harilaos “Harry” Stecopoulos is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, where he teaches courses on modern American literature, culture, and performance, with specific interests in the novel, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. His publications include the co-edited anthology Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Duke, 1997) and essays on Stuart Hall and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Russell Valentino is an associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature and the director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Iowa. His books include Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel; Persuasion and Rhetoric, translated, with an introduction and commentary, from the Italian of Carlo Michelstaedter; Materada, translated from the Italian of Fulvio Tomizza; and Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary, translated from the Croatian of Predrag Matvejevic. His essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in a variety of professional and literary journals, including Two Lines, The Iowa Review, Slavic Review, The Russian Review, The Bloomsbury Review, 91st Meridian, and eXchanges. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Autumn Hill Books, an Iowa City-based press devoted to publishing literary translations in English.
Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an unrepentant border crosser, writer, painter, former DJ, and academic who has published stories in international literary journals and newspapers as well as in major anthologies on contemporary literature in the Americas. He has been invited to give readings from his work at universities and conferences in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. Currently an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, he has also taught at Penn State, Texas A & M University, and has been a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. In 2006, as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Spain, he lectured at universities in Madrid and Salamanca. His academic work on US/Mexico border cultures has been published in journals and anthologies in Mexico and the United States.
Eliot WEINBERGER was born in 1949 in New York City, where he still lives. He is the primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. His anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (Marsilio, 1993) was a bestseller in Mexico, and his edition of Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999) received the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. In 1992, he received PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United States, and in 2000 he was the first American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico. He is the author of three books of literary essays and a collection of political articles, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award), all published by New Directions. His essay "What I Heard About Iraq" became an Internet phenomenon, was adapted into a hit play, and read at antiwar demonstrations throughout the world. His latest book is titled An Elemental Thing (New Directions, 2007).
Daniel Weissbort edited the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, which he co-founded with the late Ted Hughes, from 1965-2003. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Iowa, where he directed the MFA Program in Translation. Currently, he is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Weissbort has published numerous collections of translations and has edited several anthologies and collections of his own poetry, including Letters to Ted (Anvil, 2002).
Jane Wells is a freelance writer and producer living in New York. Since moving from the UK in 1984 she has worked for Granada Television, First Run Features, and Circulo de Lectores. She is the founder and president of Three Generations, an organization devoted to archiving and ending genocide. Over the last few years she has traveled to Sudan, Chad, Rwanda, Kenya, Botswana, Uganda and South Africa focusing her work on the plight of those whose lives have been ruined by the genocide. Her pieces about what she has witnessed in Africa have appeared in British Vogue and Diversion as well as the online journal The Huffington Post. She is producer of the feature documentary “The Devil Came on Horseback,” which premiered at Sundance in 2007.
(poet; China b. 1963, Xu Zhou) is a vice-professor of western literature and English language at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Elected in 1996 to the board of directors of the Chinese Poets’ Association, Xi Chuan (pen name of Mr. Liu Jun) has published four collections of poems, most recently Water Stains (2001), in addition to a play and translations. His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into more than ten languages. Among his many prizes is the prestigious Lu Xun Prize for literature in 2001. He is participating courtesy of the Freeman Foundation.
Ya Hsien was the first Chinese writer to participate in the IWP residency when it started in 1967. He is one of the leading modernist Chinese-language poets, and has published several books of poems. He is a storyteller in poetry; his poems are witty, musical, and have a sense of the vicissitudes of Chinese life. In 1977, he became the literary editor of the leading newspaper in Taiwan, United Daily News. He has established awards for several literary genres and brought young literary talents to prominence. Now retired, he lives in Canada. (Photo from 1967, Iowa City)
Matvei Yankelevich is the founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, where he publishes and co-edits 6x6, a poetry periodical. His translations and original work have appeared in LIT, Open City, Greetings, New York Nights, New American Writing, canwehaveourballback, Shampoo, neotrope, Dirigible, and others. His book series, Writing in the Margin, is published by Loudmouth Collective.
2008 40th Anniversary Guests
was born in 1953 in Sudan, where he worked as a teacher, freelance musician, activist and journalist (where he wrote on culture and politics for various newspapers and magazines). He has co-authored a book on traditional Sudanese musical instruments and composed music for two films. In 1991 he went into exile, and lived in Russia and Egypt before coming to the United States as a refugee in 1996.
is the author of nine novels, one volume of short stories, and one collection of essays. Born in Chile, he lived in Cuba, East Germany, West Germany, and Sweden before coming to the United States in 2000. He was an IWP fellow in 1996, and earned his master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Iowa, where he now teaches Latin American literature and creative writing and leads a Spanish-language fiction workshop. He also writes columns for La Tercera and the New York Times Syndicate. His work has been published throughout Latin America as well as in Croatia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the US. His last novel, Pasiones griegas, was voted “Best Novel Published In Spanish In 2006” by the National People’s Publishing House of China and the Association of Chinese Hispanists. Currently he is working on a novel to be released in 2008.
was born in San Luís Jilotepeque, Jalapa, Guatemala, in 1954. At the age of 7 he was taught the art of tailoring by his uncles, and from his maternal grandmother he learned Mayan mythology and a long list of refrains and sayings. He graduated as a teacher from INCAV, and in the early 1980s studied fashion merchandising in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2000 he published the book Nostalgia. At present he is the director and publisher of El Heraldo Hispano, a biweekly Spanish newspaper with a circulation of 6,000 distributed in 26 towns in Iowa and Illinois. Father of nine and grandfather of six, he has resided in Mount Pleasant, Iowa since September 1999. In 2006 he was named by former Governor Thomas Vilsack to serve as a commissioner on the Iowa Commission of Latino Affairs.
just left the presidency of Americans for UNESCO; previously he headed the American Fulbright Association of US alumni. He served for 24 years in the Near East, South Asia and Europe with the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency, principally as Cultural Attache in Beirut, Colombo (Sir Lanka), Tehran, Rome, and Paris. He presently chairs the US Committee for the Preservation of Ancient Tyre. His major book The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the 20th Century appeared in 2005 and in paperback in 2006; in 1993 he was principal editor of The Fulbright Difference: 1947-92. He holds a Ph.D. in French literature (18th century) from Columbia University, where he taught until 1961. Since leaving the Foreign Service, he has taught at the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington University. He has seven grandchildren.
recently retired from her position as associate dean of the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. While at UI, she also was a professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, specializing in African literatures. She has held offices in the African Literature Association and the African Studies Association, and also served as Interim Director of the International Writing Program and Executive Director of the Honors Program.
is the author of 18 volumes of poetry and essays. His honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He is a long-time member of the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he is the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. He has twice been named Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa.
came to the IWP in 1968 and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He taught Asian Studies at the University of Iowa, then at Yale for over twenty years. Recently retired from Yale, he is now teaching poetry at Hong Kong University. He has published several volumes of poetry, and is widely considered the modern Li Po. Like the Tang poet, he believes in the enjoyment of life: poetry, nature, and drinking. Musicality is prominent in his Chinese-language poetry. He is a frequent traveler, as demonstrated by his line: "I am a passer-by, not a returned man." (Photo from Iowa City, early 1970s)
was born in 1933 in Sulina, Romania, of Greek parents. He attended the Greek community schools of Sulina and Bucharest before emigrating to Greece after WWII. From 1947-1957 he lived with his parents in a 2,000-inmate refugee camp while also finishing his secondary education and graduating from the National University of Athens. He studied English and American literature at Yale on a Fulbright scholarship, and Comparative Literature, Classics, Old and Middle English at the University of California at Berkeley. Between 1965 and 1996 he taught in the English and Cinema and Comparative Literatures departments at the University of Iowa. He has received numerous research awards, and his publications include books and articles in scholarly journals, as well as performance and intermedia art projects.
is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. He has served as a journalist and producer at the African Broadcasting Union (URTNA) in Nairobi, Kenya, and at Cameroon Radio and Television Corporation. He has produced several video documentaries on African topics, three of which have won honorable mention at festivals in Germany and Canada. His research has been published in many journals, including The International Journal of Communication Law and Policy, Journal for Journalism in Southern Africa (Ecquid Novi), and the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications.
is an editor of Words Without Borders and a a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. She reads several languages and helped found The Front Table, a book- review web publication.
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