Spring, 2024
Writer, hello!
Here in Iowa City, we're pedaling fast and furiously in preparation for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival on campus in June and July. What a joy it is to be back in Iowa City in summer, chewing up the scenery. Meanwhile, we're fortifying ourselves, and having a ball, in online workshops throughout the year in a host of new formats (including free workshops).
This spring and summer, we're excited to offer 15 online workshops and 74 workshops on campus that explore the genres in their reaches. If you're looking to stretch your writing in new directions, check out our first-ever workshops in translation, world building, home building, Hollywood story pitching, teaching writing, fast drafting, and the meaning of life. In these pages, you'll also find workshops in the novel, short story, essay, and memoir; in poems, flash fiction, and the five-day MFA; in spiritual writing, travel writing, writing queerness, writing time, writing overwhelming subjects, and writing silence.
Since 1987, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival has welcomed to The University of Iowa writers from 18 to 98 years of age, from all 50 states, and from every continent. Most of us come to the workshop table from other areas of expertise, other lives. These include the armed forces, business, diplomacy, education, farming, homemaking, journalism, law, law enforcement, medicine, parenting, pastoral care, the performing arts, social services, and more. We come together across the genres, the generations, and at every level of literary practice in a common enterprise. We come as writers. This is the only assumption we make about each other, whether we arrive with the third draft of our novel, a message in a bottle, or merely a bee in our bonnet.
As part of the Magid Center for Writing, the Festival links arms with the Certificate in Writing, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and the Iowa Youth Writing Project—a multi-generational, cross-disciplinary citizenry in love with the written word, from kindergartners to retirees. We’re thrilled to keep such kindred company.
As a writing program, the Festival is proud to belong to Iowa City—a UNESCO City of Literature in the Creative Cities Network. Iowa City has long been a haven for writers, and The University of Iowa our ancestral home. The rich literary legacy that belongs to this place abides today in upwards of two dozen writing programs, as well as The University of Iowa Press, The Iowa Review, and The Examined Life Journal.
Some years ago, Iowa City dedicated the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk, which celebrates in bronze relief panels some of the singular voices that have come together here, from Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut to John Irving and James Tate. Everything here is closely observed--now, even the sidewalks.
The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is an opportunity for you to share your work in a community that wishes it well.
Get your coffee and pull up a chair.
Amy Margolis
Director