Amy Margolis began her career with the Festival as a graduate assistant in 1990 and continued as associate director through the nineties. She's directed the program since 2000. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s taught creative writing in the Festival, at the University of Iowa, and as a visiting writer in programs nationwide. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in The Iowa Review, most recently in the Spring 2023 issue. Amy is currently at work on a memoir-in-shards about her life as a dancer in the late seventies, at the onset of the AIDS crisis.

Aamina Ahmad was born and raised in London, England. Her first novel, The Return of Faraz Ali, was named a notable New York Times pick for 2022 and went on to win the Art Siedenbaum Los Angeles Times First Book prize, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain First Book prize, and the Gordon Bowker Volcano prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. She is also the author of a play, The Dishonored. She teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota. Her collection of short stories is forthcoming from Riverhead in 2026.

Jessica Alexander has taught creative writing workshops at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette; Franklin and Marshall College; Porchlight Literary Arts Center; and the Chattery, among other places. Her novella, None of This Is an Invitation (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) was published by Astrophil Press in summer 2023. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest. Her collaborative memoir (co-written with Vi Khi Nao) That Woman Could Be You came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her novel, Agnes, We’re Not Murderers is forthcoming from Clash Books in 2026.  https://www.jessica-alexander.com https://www.facebook.com/jessica.alexander.50767/ https://www.instagram.com/iateaghost https://twitter.com/iateaghost

Mary Allen is the author of a literary memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books, and a collection of personal essays, The Deep Limitless Air: A Memoir in Pieces, published by Blue Light Press. She has received an NEA grant, has a regular blog on the Psychology Today website, and has published short work in Poets & Writers, Real Simple, Library Journal, CNN Online, Mayday, Tiferet Journal, The Chaos, Beloit Fiction Review, and in two anthologies: If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings and The Love Book. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City, where she is a full-time writing coach.

Nancy K. Barry is an essayist and playwright from Decorah, Iowa, where she taught writing and literature at Luther College for 30 years. She is the author of radio essays, newspaper columns (on topics as varied as school lunches and attending Woodstock at the age of 14), and a one-woman play, Lessons from Cancer College. Her most recent publication appears in Live at the Elks: An Art Haus Anthology, a retrospective of poetry slams in Decorah.

Tim Bascom is the author of a novel, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire. His essays have been selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing, receiving editor prizes from The Missouri Review and Florida Review. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Zone 3, Front Range Review, and Flint Hills Review. Bascom received his MFA from the University of Iowa and taught creative writing for 20 years at the college level. He currently directs the Kansas Book Festival.

Kyle Beachy is a novelist and essayist living in New Mexico. His memoir-in-essays, The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central, 2021), was named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Electric Lit. His first novel, The Slide (The Dial Press, 2009), was the Chicago Reader’s Readers’ Choice for Best Book By a Chicago Author in 2009. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, The Point, Portable Gray, Southwest Review, Thrasher Magazine, and elsewhere.

Karen E. Bender is the author of two story collections—Refund, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and longlisted for the Story Prize—and The New Order, longlisted for the Story Prize. A third collection, The Words of Dr. L & Other Stories, will be published in May 2025. Her stories have been published in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. They have won three Pushcart Prizes. She has taught for the MFA programs at Hollins University, Warren Wilson College, and Chatham University, and currently teaches for the MFA programs at SUNY Stony Brook and Alma College. She also teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival online and for WritingWorkshops.com. Her website is http://www.karenebender.com.

Venise Berry is the author of three national bestselling novels: So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton, 2000), and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton, 2002). Her book of essays Driven: Reflections on Love, Career, and the Pursuit of Happiness was published in 2015 (BerryBooks). She has recently finished her fourth novel, Pockets of Sanity, and is seeking an agent. She has co-authored two nonfiction resource books, The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2007) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel 2001). She has also co-edited several anthologies including The Black Superwoman and Mental Health: Power and Pain (Peter Lang, 2025), Black Culture and Experience: Contemporary Issues (Peter Lang, 2015), and Mediated Messages and African-American Culture: Contemporary Issues (Sage, 1996). Berry is a professor of Journalism and African American Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. She received a BA (1977) in Journalism and an MA (1979) in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. Her PhD was awarded in 1989 in Radio, TV, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her professional media career began in radio news but has expanded into teaching, media research, and criticism, as well as fiction and nonfiction writing. For more information, visit Venise’s web site at: www.veniseberry.com

Anna Bruno is the author of Fine Young People and Ordinary Hazards. She teaches at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Previously, Anna managed public relations and marketing for technology and financial services companies in Silicon Valley. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MBA from Cornell University, and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Iowa City with her husband, two sons, and blue heeler.

Kelly Dwyer is the author of three novels, most recently Ghost Mother, published in 2024 by Union Square & Co., as well as flash fictions and plays. She was educated at Oberlin College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for about 25 years. A native of San Pedro, California, Kelly divides her time between Madison, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. Please visit her at http://www.kellydwyerauthor.com

Hope Edelman, a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers. Her books have been published in 17 countries and 11 languages, and her articles and essays have been published in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today, Parade, Real Simple, and CNN.com. She is a certified life coach with training in narrative therapy and trauma support services, and as the founder of Motherlessdaughters.com she creates and leads online support groups and in-person retreats for women who lost mothers when they were young. Hope lives in Los Angeles for most of the year and spends summers in Iowa City.

Mieke Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer who grew up in Los Angeles. She earned a BA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, an MA in English from the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She has been an instructor in the Magid Center Undergraduate Writing Program at the University of Iowa, UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in Los Angeles, and at Amsterdam University College and Leiden University College in The Netherlands, among others. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Pen America, Pank, Guernica, and Creative Nonfiction. Her work has further been anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2011; Norton’s Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts; and A Book of Uncommon Prayer. Her writing has been selected as a “notable essay” in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. All Ships Follow Me (Picador), a book about her parents’ respective experiences in World War II and the inheritance of war trauma, was published in 2019. She is currently working on a memoir about her younger years travelling with the circus. She lives in Amsterdam.

Tricia Elam Walker is an award-winning author, educator, and recovered lawyer. Her first novel, Breathing Room, was published by Simon & Schuster/PocketBooks. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Essence, and other publications. She has provided commentary for NPR, CNN, the BBC, and more. Tricia’s short stories are included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, and other anthologies, and her essays have been published in Father’s Songs, Dream Me Home Safely, It’s All About Love, and more. Several of her plays have been produced, and her two children’s books (Nana Akua Goes to School, which won a 2021 Children’s Africana Book Award and the 2021 Ezra Jack Keats writer award; and Dream Street, which was a New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2021 selection) were published by Random House during the pandemic. She has taught numerous writing workshops around the country and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University. Tricia lives in Maryland, where she is working on more children’s books and a second adult novel.

Hugh Ferrer (MFA in fiction, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) is a writer living in Iowa City. Over the last two decades, he has introduced University of Iowa undergraduates to fiction writing, international literature, journal publishing, and Iowa City’s literary culture; brought leading international authors to campus as the International Writing Program’s Associate Director; and served for fifteen years as an editor at The Iowa Review.

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN Award), Just beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award), Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter (Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing), and a forthcoming memoir, The New World. She is the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Theodore Hoepfner Award, a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Florida Arts Council Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, and a Carl Klaus Teaching Award, and was a juror for the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Nonfiction (Yale University). She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for over 25 years. She has also taught writing in France, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Spain.

Diana Goetsch (www.dianagoetsch.com) is a poet and essayist, author of eight poetry collections, much freelance journalism, and the acclaimed memoir This Body I Wore. Reviewers have called her writing “enthralling,” “exquisite,” “hilarious,” “harrowing” and “achingly beautiful.” Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, LitHub, and NPR. Diana is a renowned teacher of writing, who has been on faculty at numerous colleges and conferences, and is sought after as a mentor. Her online course Actually Writing was attended by poets and writers from five continents, and is now available on Vimeo.

Eric Goodman is the author of eight books, most recently Mother of Bourbon (2025), his first historical novel, which tells the story of Mary Dowling, the only woman to own major bourbon distilleries in pre-Prohibition Kentucky. In 2024, he published Curveball, a love story and literary baseball novel, and a sequel to his best-known novel, In Days of Awe (1991). Goodman has taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for nearly 20 happy years. A graduate of the Stanford graduate creative writing program, he lives in Santa Rosa, CA and Mecklenburg, NY, with his wife, author Susan Morgan.

Robin Hemley has published sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent book is the memoir-in-essays How to Change History: A Salvage Project (Nebraska, 2025). Other books include the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021), and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020; Penguin SE Asia, 2021). He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his stories have been widely anthologized. His widely used writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold over a hundred thousand copies. His work has been published and translated widely, and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, and The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. His short stories have been featured several times on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and his essays and short stories have appeared in such journals as Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many others. He is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years; inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore; and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction (Specualtivenonfiction.org). He has delivered readings, workshops, and lectures around the world and is a Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa. The Digital Storytelling Lab at The University of Iowa was recently dedicated in his honor. Visit his website at Robinhemley.com or subscribe to his Substack at Robinhemley.substack.com.

Charles Holdefer is the Brussels-based author of six novels, most recently Don’t Look at Me (2022). His collections of short fiction include Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic (2024). His novel The Contractor (2012) was an American Booksellers Association “Book Sense Pick” and was translated into several languages. His short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is also the fiction editor for The Exacting Clam magazine. Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com.

Jared Joseph lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University. Recent work has been published in Notre Dame Review, Gulf Coast, and Interim. Joseph’s book Danny the Ambulance, published by Outpost19, is a novel about a bar full of people named Danny; Rose Mask, published by Five Nine, is a work of theater staging the repetitive and ineluctable hell that is the service industry. Soft Lighting, forthcoming from Bench in 2025, will be a setting-less novel.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections Ready for the World, Empire Wasted, and LA Liminal. She has taught at colleges and universities around the country and through community programs such as Iowa City Poetry, the Midwest Writing Center, and the University of Chicago’s Writer’s Studio. She directed the Center for the Literary Arts at Cornell College, helped run the BA and MFA creative writing programs at Columbia College Chicago, and has independently hosted salons, talk series, and reading groups. As an editor, Becca co-founded Switchback Books and is co-editing the anthology Electric Gurlesque. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she holds degrees from the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD).

Afabwaje Kurian is the author of the novel Before the Mango Ripens, which was longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, The Bare Life Review, and Joyland. She has received residencies at Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, for its International Writing Program, and for The Writer’s Center in the greater DC area. www.afabwaje.com

Madeline McDonnell is the author of three books of fiction, including the novel, Lonesome Ballroom, just out with Rescue Press. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and has taught creative writing, literature, and composition courses at many places, for many years. She is excited to return to the festival this summer! When not in Iowa City, she can be found in Oregon (or 🕳️).

James McKean writes poetry and nonfiction. He’s published three books of poems—Headlong, Tree of Heaven, and We Are the Bus—and two books of essays: Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports and Bound. His work has appeared in magazines and collections such as The Atlantic, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Best American Sports Writing 2003, and Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game. His awards include the 1987 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award in Poetry, the 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize, the 2011 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press, and a Pushcart Prize. McKean lives in Edmonds, WA, and teaches for the Queens University MFA Creative Writing Program, the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

June Melby is the author of My Family and Other Hazards (Holt, 2014), a memoir about her family’s retro 1950s miniature golf course in Wisconsin. It won the Midwest Connections award as well as being a New York Times Best Seller. A former standup comedian and spoken word artist, she has performed at literary festivals, national poetry slams, and on three European tours. She released three CDs of poetry with her original music accompanied by her band, June Melby and Her Future Enemies. June's work has been heard on Wisconsin Public Radio and seen in Ilanot Review, Muse/A Journal, Forklift Ohio, Fugue, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Versal, Utne Reader, Water~Stone, LA Weekly, and Kaffee.Satz.Lesen v.2, out of Hamburg, Germany. She received an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and currently lives in a log cabin in the woods with her husband.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of the essay collection The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint, 2017) and a translator from Portuguese. His work has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship. A fiction editor at DIAGRAM, he lives in Iowa City, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Iowa.

For over 20 years, Kat O’Brien has developed film and television for Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Sony, Anonymous Content, Focus Features, Rogue Pictures, Alcon Entertainment Morgan Creek Productions, Blue Star Entertainment, and numerous internationally renowned and critically acclaimed independent filmmakers and television producers. During the pandemic, Kat executive produced We Still Teach TV, for which she was awarded the Chicago Teachers’ Union LEAD award as a champion for education justice. As a world-renowned expert in story development, Kat has consulted for the Doha Film Institute and Film AlUla, and teaches at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, and The Second City Film School. She holds a BFA in Writing for Film and Television from the University of Southern California. You can read more and contact her at kobwriting.com.

Caryl Pagel is the author of four books, most recently Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry, University of Akron Press) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays, FC2). She is a publisher and editor at Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Pagel teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program. She is the recipient of the 2025 Lorine Niedecker Fellowship and is working on book about Niedecker and the Great Lakes.

Tricia Park is a writer and violinist. A Juilliard graduate, she received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, F Newsmagazine, and Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology. Since her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career and Fulbright Grants. She has a podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Currently, Tricia is pursuing her PhD at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Program for Writers and is Associate Director of Cleaver Magazine Workshops. She is working on her first book.