Overview
In 2024, with the continued support of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) we were thrilled to offer two 2-week long in person sessions that welcomed 37 participants from the countries of Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Slovakia, United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
Between the Lines: Peace and the Writing Experience (16th Session) esteemed faculty team of Tariro Ndoro, Senka Marić, Vladimir Poleganov, and Rochelle Potkar embraced innovative pedagogical techniques to thoughtfully guide participants through classes centered in creative writing and cultural exchange. Through diverse writing prompts combined with multi and cross-genre explorations, our faculty explicitly encouraged experimentation and creative risk as students embraced deep conversations about literary craft and techniques. In literature seminars, participants traversed the boundaries of time and space to engage with an array of intentionally selected writers and works from throughout history, including Haruki Marukami’s “Tony Takitani”, Sandra Cisneros’s “Salvador Late or Early”, Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”, and others. Our students enjoyed utilizing university spaces like Schaeffer Hall and Phillips Hall for these classes, which allowed them to dig into these rigorous texts in the heart of downtown Iowa City.
Between the Lines: Identity and Belonging, we were honored to welcome returning faculty member José Olivarez alongside Mansoura Ez-Eldin, both of whom gracefully engaged students in complex literary experiences that cultivated space for each of them to honor and investigate their personal and collective histories. Participants unpacked the intricate nuances of identity, with each student understanding that their unique voices and experiences belonged in the classroom. Joining our students in the classroom were the compelling works of writers such as Agha Shahid Ali, Danez Smith, Binyavanga Wainaina, Koon Woon, and many others.
In addition to daily writing workshops and global literature seminars, students were thrilled to learn from esteemed teachers across genres and creative disciplines in Iowa’s thriving arts community. Lauren Haldeman offered a course on digital storytelling, Christopher Lysik navigated how dialogue and playwriting works, Lauren Linder and Douglas V Baker presented a class on contemporary dance, Dana King introduced participants to book making, and Khaled Rajeh for taking our participants through the various steps of translating poems and other literary works from one language into another. Our students had a multiplicity of opportunities to investigate questions of peace, identity, diversity and unity across various art practices. With program assistant Razan Hamza, students had the opportunity to explore lyricism, the intricacies of songwriting and poetry, and the mechanisms of rhyme structures under Razan’s skillful guidance; co-program assistant Grace Morse also led a seminar on memoir and metaphorical map-making, prompting students to use fragmented and associative writing prompts to consider the intersections between identity and literary cartography.
2024 Session dates & Anthologies:
Session I: Peace and the Writing Experience
Senka Marić is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Do smrti naredne [ Until the next death] (2016) and the novels Kintsugi tijela (2018) and Gravitacije (2021), translated into English as “Body Kintsugi and Gravities,” and to several other languages. The former received the 2018 Meša Selimović Award for best novel in BiH, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro, the English PEN Translates Award 2022, and was shortlisted for the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize; Gravitacije won the 2022 Štefica Cvek Award for feminist writing. Marić often participates in European literary events, teaches writing workshops, and is the editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Strane.ba. (IWP Fall Resident ’23, BTL ’24, Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Mary Hickman was born in Idaho and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Hickman is the author of two books of poems, This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Rayfish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), which won the James Laughlin Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and chosen by Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, and Carmen Giménez Smith. An assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, she also teaches in (and loves!) the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program. (BTL Faculty ’15, ’16, ’17, ’20, ’21, U.S.)
Vladimir Poleganov is the author of one collection of short stories, The Deconstruction of Thomas S (2013, St. Kliment Ohridski University Press) and one novel, The Other Dream (2016, Colibri), which won the Helikon Award for Best Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. “The Birds”, a short story, was featured in Dalkey Archive Press’ anthology Best European Fiction 2016. In 2016, he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This was followed by residencies in Shanghai and Sun Yat-sen University in China. He has translated novels by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Octavia E. Butler, and Peter Beagle into Bulgarian. In 2020, his translation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo won the Association of Bulgarian Translators Prize. He is currently working on a PhD in Bulgarian literature at Sofia University where he also teaches courses on creative writing and fantastic literature. (IWP Fall Resident ’16, BTL faculty ’20 and ’21, Bulgaria)
Rochelle Potkar is a fictionist, poet, and screenwriter. Rochelle is an alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University of Stirling (2017). Author of Four Degrees of Separation and Paper Asylum, which was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020. She had her poetry film Skirt featured on Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland. Her short story collection Bombay Hangovers was released in 2021. Widely-anthologized, a few of her poems and stories have won prizes. Her first screenplay was a quarter-finalist at the Atlanta Film Festival Screenwriting competition 2020. (IWP Fall Resident ’15, Summer Institute Mentor ’19, India)
Session 2: Identity and Belonging
Mansoura Ez-Eldin is an award-winning author of 10 books. Her book Walks in Shanghai received the Ibn Battuta Prize for travel literature 2021, her novel Emerald Mountain received the award of the best Arabic novel in 2014, from Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF). The Serbian edition of her novel Shadow Specters was shortlisted for the Miloš Đurić Prize for literary translation issued by the Serbian Association of literary translators, and the French edition of her novel The Orchards of Basra was shortlisted for Le Prix de la Littérature Arabe, 2023. Her short story collection “A haven for the absence” was shortlisted for the prestigious Al-Multaqa Prize for Arabic short story 2018 and Sheikh Zayed Award for literature 2020. In 2009, she was selected for the Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arab authors below the age of 40. Her writing has appeared, among other places, in Granta, New York Times, A Public Space and The Neue Zürcher Zeitung. (IWP Fall Resident ’23, BTL ’24, Egypt).
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. (BTL Faculty)
Shared Experiences
