We regret the passing, on April 11, 2024, of the distinguished Romanian author and critic Dan Cristea, who served as the editor in chief of the Luceafărul de Dimineață cultural monthly. In addition to being an alum of the 1985 Fall Residency, Cristea received his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.
After a first trial run in the spring of 2012, when the IWP was invited to collaborate with the dynamic Battery Dance Company of NYC during a reading tour on location in Fortalezza (Brazil), a second opportunity came our way in the fall of 2012. With “freedom” – the ability to move without constraints—as the keyword, writers submitted short texts, which then came to double as both inspiration and score for the dancers’ performances.
In fact, the word “freedom” had been keyed to the space originally chosen for the event, the Grand Hall of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, and preparations were well underway with the assistance of the National Park Service staff. When Hurricane Sandy struck on October 29th, less than a week before our scheduled performance, battering Ellis Island along with huge swaths of the northeastern shoreline, the Battery Dance Company generously welcomed the writers to their own—miraculously unscathed—work space in lower Manhattan.
IWP participants
- Taleb Alrefai (Kuwait)
- Genevieve Asenjo (Philippines)
- Luis Bravo (Uruguay)
- T.J. Dema (Botswana)
- Alisa Ganieva (Russia)
- Christopher Merrill (USA)
- Christopher Mlalazi (Zimbabwe)
- Pandora (Burma)
- Milagros Socorro (Venezuela)
- Stephanie Ye (Singapore)
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