Participants by Genre

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.

RA Heeduk received her PhD in Korean Language and Literature from Yonsei University in 2006. She has authored five books of poetry, most recently ‘A Disappeared Palm’ (2004); one collection of essays (‘A Water Bucket Filled By Half,’ 1999); and a volume of literary criticism (‘Where Does the Purple Come From,’ 2003). Among her awards is an I-San Prize for Literature (2004). She currently teaches literature at Chosun University in Kwangju. She participates courtesy of Arts Council Korea.

Eavan BOLAND, 2009's Ida Beam distinguished Visiting Professor, is universally acknowledged as the preeminent female poet and contemporary writer of her native Ireland. She has published nine volumes of poetry, including Domestic Violence (2007) and New Collected Poems (2008), both with W.W. Norton. Her awards include the Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. She is on the board of the Irish Arts Council, a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and on the advisory board of the International Writers Center at Washington University. She lives in Stanford, California, where she is professor of English at Stanford University and director of the creative writing program.

Ilya KAMINSKY is the author of Dancing In Odessa (2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine, and was named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. In 2008, he received Lannan Foundation's Literary Fellowship; in 2009, poems from his manuscript Deaf Republic were awarded Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. The anthology of 20th century poetry in translation he edited, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, appeared in 2010. Kaminsky is also the editor of Poetry International and the poetry editor of Words Without Borders. He teaches at San Diego State University.

DAI Fan / 戴凡 (nonfiction and fiction writer, scholar; China) is a 2012-13 Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar in the Nonfiction Writing Program at University of Iowa. She writes in both Chinese and English, with four collections of essays in Chinese, and the novel Butterfly Lovers in English. Her work in English has appeared in Drunken Boat and Asia Literary Review. She is a professor of linguistics, and the director of the Center for Creative Writing of the School Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. She teaches one of the very few creative writing courses in English as a second language in China.

Margarita MATEO PALMER (critic, essayist, novelist; Cuba) has her extensive critical work collected in seven volumes of essays; she is also the author of the novel Desde los blancos manicomios (2008). Her writing on Caribbean literatures has earned her fellowships at Harvard and Tulane, six iterations of Premio Nacional de la Crítica, and many other literary awards. Mateo Palmer is a member of the Cuban Academy of Language. Her participation is made possible by the U.S. Embassy in Havana and the Ludwig Foundation.

Peter Nazareth (Uganda/USA, IWP '73), a novelist and literary critic of Goan and Malaysian descent, is Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and, since 1977, Senior Program Advisor to the International Writing Program. His first novel, In a Brown Mantle, brought him to United States through a Yale Fellowship. Later works include the novel The General Is Up,  and scholarly publications Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong'o (2000) and Pivoting on the Point of Return: Modern Goan Literature (2010). He lives in Iowa City with his wife of over 50 years, Mary Nazareth, herself a core member of IWP staff. 

Antoinette TIDJANI ALOU (fiction writer, poet, translator, scholar; Niger) teaches literature and directs the Program of Performing Arts at Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey. She has been the president of the International Society for Oral Literatures of Africa, and a collaborator on the “Women Writing Africa” project. Her first work, On m’appelle Nina, retraces the exilic experiences of a woman who leaves Jamaica for France, then Niger. A short story collection, a volume of poetry and a memoir are forthcoming. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Tim Parks (UK/Italy) is a novelist, essayist, travel writer and translator based in Italy. Author of sixteen novels, including Europa (1997), Destiny (1999), Cleaver (2006), and more recently In Extremis (2017), he has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi, Machiavelli and Leopardi. While running a post-graduate degree course in translation at International University of Languages and Media in Milan, he writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. His many non-fiction works include A Season with Verona (2002), An Italian Education (2006), and Italian Ways (2014). His critical work includes the essay collection Where I’m Reading From (2014), The Novel, A Survival Skill (2015), and Translating Style: A Literary Approach to Translation, published in a revised edition in 2007.