Life of Discovery 2012 文化探寻

In its fourth year, the Life of Discovery exchange program beween the International Writing Program (IWP) and the China Writers' Association (CWA) brought together young American and Chinese poets, fiction writers, and playwrights to discuss literature, translation, and culture, and to engage in mutual creative writing projects. Through exchange and dialogue, IWP and CWA writers learned something of the each country's literature, formed friendships, and mutually created new work. Sponsored through grant funds provided by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, the first half of the 2012 Life of Discovery exchange program brought a delegation of American writers to China from June 26th to July 7th and continued in the United States from Oct. 27th - Nov. 3rd, when the Chinese delegation visits Chicago and Iowa City. 

The theme for this LOD exchange was "Reading the City." The American writers visiting China spent the bulk of their time in Beijing and Shanghai, enormous urban areas with populations of over 19 and 23 million, respectively, with day trips to the Juyongguang section of China's Great Wall and the water village of Zhouzhuang. For our creative sessions, we asked the writers to consider how they "read" space physically, creatively, intellectually, and emotionally. Whether it's the Tokyo of Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Alice Munro's Toronto, the city has long been of interest to writers and this year, we asked our writers to consider the cities they visited together (Beijing, Shanghai, Zhouzhuang, Chicago, and Iowa City) and how they might respond to them in their creative work.

American Participants

Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2), for which she won the 2008 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her first novel, THREATS, was published this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, and DIAGRAM, among others.

Dora MALECH is a poet, professor, and visual artist. She is the author of two books of poetry, Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her poems appear in numerous publications, including The New Yorker,Poetry, Poetry London, The Yale Review, Tin House, The New Census (Rescue Press, 2013), Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (ABRAMS, 2015), and The Best American Poetry 2015 (Simon & Schuster, 2015). A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Writers' Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center, and she has served as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California. She was recently awarded an Amy Clampitt Residency for Spring 2017. She is a co-founder and former director of the arts outreach organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. She lives in Baltimore, where she is on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and is serving as an inaugural Engaged Faculty Fellow through the JHU Center for Social Concern in 2015-2016.

Kaui Hart Hemmings was born and raised in Hawaii. She has degrees from Colorado College and Sarah Lawrence and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the author of the story collection House of Thieves and of the novel The Descendants, which has been published in fifteen countries and adapted for the screen by director by Alexander Payne in 2011.

Dan O’Brien’s current projects include The Body of an American, winner of the 2011 L. Arnold Weissberger Award, set to premiere at Portland Center Stage in 2012, and Theotokia / The War Reporter, an opera premiering at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University in 2013. Previous productions include The Cherry Sisters Revisited (Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival), The House in Hydesville (Geva Theatre Center), The Voyage of the Carcass (SoHo Playhouse; Page 73 Productions), The Dear Boy (Second Stage Theatre), and Moving Picture (Williamstown Theatre Festival). He has served as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and twice the Tennessee Williams Fellow at The University of the South (Sewanee). Residencies include the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Yaddo, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. O’Brien’s poetry has appeared recently in Missouri Review, Malahat Review, Poetry Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. This summer he will teach playwriting at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Originally from New York, O’Brien lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair.

Program Coordinator - Nate Brown 

Chinese Participants

Liu Yewei (刘业伟), a Chinese author whose pen name is Yewei, was born in Zaozhuang, Shandong province in 1977. He studied at Qufu Normal University, Nanjing Normal University and Lu Xun Academy of Literature. He is currently a member of the China Writers Association, director of the Jiangsu Provincial Painting and Calligraphy Association, vice chairman of the Writers Association of Xuzhou City, and head of the editorial department of Jiangsu Normal University News. Liu started writing literary works in 1990 and has published over three million characters in the form of medium-length and short stories in various literary periodicals such as Fiction Monthly. He has published a novel, Rich Mine, and a university.com series. He is also the author of several academic works, including “Analyzing Four Generations of Ye Shengtao Family in the View of Editing” and “Observing the Literary Circle from the Sidelines: between Universities and Media”. Liu was awarded the Jiangsu Purple Mountain Literary Award, and received a top ten Young Poets Award of “Times Literature” among many other literary awards. He was also honored for his acheivements in the categories of Drama, TV Soap Opera, Books, Songs and Criticism for Xu Zhou city, and his calligraphy has been featured in the Chinese Writer Calligraphy and Painting Exhibition, where he received the “Wen Xin Mo Yu” Prize (for the expression of one’s literal thought with Chinese calligraphy). Liu’s masterpiece, Rich Mine, is widely acclaimed and was a finalist in the 8th Mao Dun Literature Prize. Currently, Liu Yewei works for Jiangsu Normal University.

Sun Wei is a Chinese novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. She was born in 1973 in Shanghai and grew up in a family of intellectuals. She received her B.A. in journalism from Fudan University in 1996 and her master's in International Business Administration from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2001. She started writing fairy tales and novels in her teenage years. She is interested in exploring the theme of ‘malaise’ in an increasingly materialistic world, with a fickle and fast-developing economy in China as the social background. She has published 13 books and over 20 novels and novelettes.

Mao Juzhen (毛菊珍), whose pen name is A Mao, is a poet and author born in Xiantao, Hubei Province, China. A Mao now lives in Wuhan. She is the member of China Writers Association, Hubei Provincial Writers Association, and the Wuhan Academy of Literature. She graduated with a degree in philosophy from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in 1989, and began writing poetry in the late 1980s. She has published more than ten literary works, including five collections of poems: Injured by Water (1992), Supreme Stars (1999), The song of my Time (1999), Rotating Mirror (2006), Variation (2010); and three collections of prose: The Train of Images (1998), Stone's passion (2009), Apple's rule (2011); and the short story collections Apple on the Cup (1996), Desire (1999), Who Takes Me Home (2005), and The Eternal life in Love (2011). She has won several poetry awards including the Annual Poet Prize from Poetry Monthly in 2007, the 7th Chinese National Youth Poet Award from Poetry Periodical, the Best Love Poems for the Year 2009 in China, and from Aug 2009-Aug 2010, she served as the poet-in-residence at Capital Normal University in Beijing.

Happening Now

  • Congratulations to our colleagues Jennifer Croft and Aron Aji, who are among those serving as judges for the National Book Awards this year, in their case in the category of translated literature.

  • Ranjit Hoskote’s speech at the 2024 Goa Literary Festival addresses the current situation in Gaza.

  • In NY Times, Bina Shah worries about the state of Pakistani—and American—democracy.

  • “I went to [Ayodhya] to think about what it means to be an Indian and a Hindu... ”  A new essay by critic and novelist Chandrahas Choudhury.

  • In the January 2024 iteration of the French/English non-fiction site Frictions, T J Benson writes about “Riding Afrobeats Across the World.” Also new, a next installment in the bilingual series featuring work by students from Paris VIII’s Creative Writing program and the University of Iowa’s NFW program.

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