2007%20Resident Participants

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2008 40th Anniversary Guests

Abdalla Mohamed ABDALLA 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.

Roberto Ampuero

Roberto AMPUERO 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.

Oscar Argueta

Oscar ARGUETA 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.

Richard T. Arndt

Richard T. Arndt 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.

Sandra Barkan

Sandra Barkan 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.

Marvin Bell

Marvin Bell 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.

Cheng Chou-yu

Cheng Chou-yu (鄭愁予) 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)

Stavros Deligiorgis

Stavros Deligiorgis 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.

Lyombe "Leo" Eko

Lyombe “Leo” Eko 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.

Dedi Felman 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.

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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