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.

Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country. She is the recipient of a 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in nonfiction, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and a Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award. She has also received honors from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Writing Residency, and the Utah Arts Council. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Georgia Review, The Sewanee Review, Story, The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area, where she teaches in the MFA Program at Saint Mary's College of California.

Jessica Alexander’s 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, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her collaborative project That Woman Could Be You (co-written with Vi Khi Nao) came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her novel, Agnes, We’re Not Murderers, is forthcoming from Clash Books. 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 a regular “personal perspectives” blog on the Psychology Today website and has published short work in Poets & Writers, Real Simple, Library Journal, CNN On-line, Shenandoah, Tiferet Journal, The Chaos, and Beloit Fiction Review. She received an NEA fellowship for creative writing in 2002, won first prize in Tiferet Journal’s spiritual writing contest in 2013, and was one of two finalists in Tiferet’s spiritual writing contest in 2019. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at the University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City and is a full-time writing coach.

Ren Arcamone is an Australian writer. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and she’s a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction appears in Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, where she’s at work on a short story collection and a novel.

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 prizewinning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire. His essays have won editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, and have also been selected for the anthologies The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Travel Writing. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Zone 3, Front Range Review, and Briar Cliff Review, where he won the 2021 Fiction Prize. Bascom received his MFA from the University of Iowa, and he has taught creative writing for over twenty years at the undergraduate and graduate level, leading dozens of workshops in the U.S. and abroad. Currently, he directs the Kansas Book Festival.

Anna Bruno is the author of Ordinary Hazards (Atria, 2020) and Fine Young People, forthcoming from Algonquin in 2025. Anna teaches at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and coaches professionals in creative business communication. 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.

Jennifer Colville holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Utah. She currently works as the director of PorchLight Literary Arts Center in Iowa City and of PromptPress, a publisher of ekphrastic and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Her collection of short stories, “Elegies for Uncanny Girls,” was published by Indiana University Press, and her short stories and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Diagram, the Northwestern Review and the Huffington Post. Her essay “White Ink and the Great American Macho” was a Longreads pick of the week, and named a favorite essay of the year by Entropy. Her novel in progress has been supported by a fellowship from the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kelly Dwyer's third novel, Ghost Mother, will be published by Union Square & Company in Fall 2024. Kelly taught in the University of Wisconsin system for fifteen years and has taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for over twenty-five years. Whether working with authors in person or online, Kelly is passionate about helping other writers achieve success. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Oberlin College, Kelly grew up in San Pedro, California, and now divides her time between Madison, WI, and Los Angeles, CA. Kelly also writes flash fiction and plays, which have been performed in New York City, Boston, and Glasgow. Feel free to visit http://www.kellydwyerauthor.com/

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.

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), and Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, and the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. After getting an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for 25 years. She’s published over 120 essays and stories in journals such as Ploughshares and Virginia Quarterly Review and has been awarded the Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing, a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, and a Carl Klaus Teaching Award. She has taught writing in France, Australia, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic. She is currently finishing a memoir and working on a linked story collection.

Diana Goetsch is the author of eight collections of poems, the acclaimed memoir This Body I Wore, and numerous feature articles and columns. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, The LA Times, The Washington Post, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. She has taught in public schools, prisons, MFA programs and, for twenty-two years, at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Her website is www.dianagoetsch.com

Eric Goodman is the author of seven novels including Curveball, published in May 2024. About Curveball, novelist T.C. Boyle has commented: “Eric Goodman’s Curveball dwells in its details in the most fascinating way—and it reaches far beyond its baseball setting to become a first-rate intergenerational drama as well as a delightful read.”  Goodman lives in Sonoma County and Mecklenburg, NY, with his wife and grown-up COVID kittens. He was the longtime creative writing director at Miami University (Ohio), and he’s taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for many years. This will be his first summer back since before the pandemic. And he is pumped.

Sands Hall is the author of the award-winning memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint Press); Blackstone Audio produced the audiobook, read by the author. She is also the author of the novel, Catching Heaven, and a book of essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft (Moving Finger). Her prizewinning essays and stories have appeared in journals such as Alta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Iowa Review, and New England Review, among others. Also a playwright, singer-songwriter, and musician, Sands recently released a second album, Sturdy Boots. Her extensive theatre experience, as actor and director, enables her to offer a unique perspective on writing, and infuses her teaching. This is the twenty-eighth year Sands has taught for the Festival. www.sandshall.com

Robin Hemley has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are 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 and has been in print for nearly thirty years. 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; was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa for nine years; served as 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) and co-founder of Authors at Large with Xu Xi (aalauthors.com). His websites are Robinhemley.com and Oblvion.cafe. His forthcoming collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (Nebraska, 2025). Subscribe to his Substack at Robinhemley.substack.com.

Christine Hemp is an author, poet, speaker, and innovative teacher. She has taught at Harvard University, University of New Mexico, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Seattle’s Hugo House, and at numerous organizations, including the London Metropolitan Police (how poetry can be used as a tool for crime prevention). Her poems and essays have aired on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and have appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, Iowa Review, Harvard Magazine, and in anthologies published by Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. She is the author of Wild Ride Home (Arcade Publishing, 2020), a personal memoir. Her awards include a Harvard University Conway Award for Teaching Writing, two Barbara Deming Money for Women grants, and the Donald Murray Prize for creative nonfiction. She was first runner-up in the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. Her essay about sending one of her poems into space on a NASA rocket received a Northwest Society of Professional Journalism Award. Christine has a BA from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and an MA from Middlebury College in Vermont, with study at Lincoln College, Oxford, England. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with two horses, two cats, and one husband.

Charles Holdefer is the Brussels-based author of six novels, most recently Don’t Look at Me (2022). 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. His collection of short stories, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic, will be published in 2024. Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com.

Wayne Johnson (MFA, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) is the author of, among other books, seven novels, a collection of stories, a memoir, and two nonfiction works. Three of his books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, two have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, one has been selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series and named a finalist for book of the year, and another chosen as a Kansas City Star Book of the Year. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, O. Henry and Best American Short Stories citations, and a Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project Fellowship in L.A., sponsored by Steven Spielberg. Wayne has worked in Hollywood for nearly thirty years under his own and pen names. As a ghostwriter/editor, he has seen tens of books to completion, and as a script doctor has worked on countless films, two of which were Sundance finalists for Best Drama, and another a 2018 finalist for Best Screenplay at the Brooklyn Film Festival. Wayne has a new novel forthcoming, as well as projects with film studios and streaming television.

Jared Joseph’s most recent writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and Action. His novel Danny the Ambulance is available from Civil Coping Mechanisms Press, and A Book About Myself Called Hell is available from Kernpunkt Press. Jared holds a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Los Angeles where he writes, teaches, and drinks coffee like it's a hot dog eating contest..

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).

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five books of poems: Crushing It, Days of Shame & Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me. Known for their dark, imaginative humor, her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, five times in The Best American Poetry series, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has taught poetry writing classes at New York University, Hunter College, and 24PearlStreet at the Fine Arts Work Center. Knox earned her MFA from New York University. Her honors include three Milwaukee Poetry Slam champion titles, an American Rescue Plan/NEA grant for her public ecopoetic project, MYCYOWA, and an NEA/Iowa Arts Council Fellowship for her crowdsourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth. Jennifer lives in central Iowa, where is the proprietor of a tiny spice blend company called Saltlickers.

Afabwaje Kurian received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently at work on her debut novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Callaloo, Crazyhorse, The Bare Life Review, Joyland Magazine, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and its International Writing Program. She has served as a fiction screener for Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters and is a two-time recipient of the Prairie Lights John Leggett Fiction Prize for short story writing. She has received residencies at Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She currently teaches with The Writer’s Center in Washington, DC. Please visit: https://www.afabwaje.com/

Malinda McCollum is the author of The Surprising Place, winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review (which awarded her the Plimpton Prize), McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, Epoch, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow, she has taught at the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University. She’s currently an associate professor at the College of Charleston, where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs and is an editor at swamp pink.

Madeline McDonnell is the author of three books of fiction, including the forthcoming novel Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press, 2024). 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, most recently the MFA program at Portland State University. She lives in Oregon with her family.

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.

Amanda Montei is the author, most recently, of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, & Control. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, ELLE, TIME, The Cut, Mother Tongue, Slate, Electric Literature, Vox, The Rumpus, Salon, The Believer, Ms. Magazine, Poetry Foundation, and in numerous literary journals. She was a 2020 Best American Essays notable. Amanda has been teaching writing for over a decade. She has taught, lectured, and presented work at universities around the country, including Stanford University, Columbia University, New York University, The University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught with many literary organizations such as Catapult, Corporeal Writing, Hugo House, Writing Workshops, and Write or Die. She holds an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in English literature from SUNY at Buffalo. She runs the popular newsletter Mad Woman and lives in California.