For more than 80 years writers have come to Iowa City to work on their manuscripts and to exchange ideas about writing and reading with each other and with the faculty. Many of them have gone on to publish award-winning work after graduating. With the spirit of an arts colony and the benefits of the research University of which we are a part, the Writers' Workshop continues to foster and to celebrate American literature in all its varied forms.

Welcome to our new website

Thank you for visiting our updated virtual home!

Sam Chang and Lara Ehrlich

Lan Samantha Chang, Writers' Workshop director, talks to Laura Ehrlich about balancing writing and motherhood

Events

Events

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs Q&A promotional image

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs Q&A

Friday, March 29, 2024 12:00pm
Dey House
The Writers' Workshop presents a Q&A session with Latasha N. Nevada Diggs. A writer and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center. A Cave Canem fellow, Diggs is the recipient of numerous awards, including ones from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council...

Mission Creek Festival | Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games with Carmen Maria Machado, Larissa Pham, and J Robert Lennon

Friday, April 5, 2024 7:30pm
Prairie Lights Books
This special 7:30 p.m. Mission Creek Festival event celebrates something you may not know some of your favorite authors are interested in: gaming. Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, published by Graywolf, celebrates this sophisticated medium and considers its lasting impact on our culture and ourselves. “[Video games] raise profound questions for the humans who find themselves enraptured by these digital puzzles, adventures, and battles lighting up their computers, televisions, or...

Live from Prairie Lights | Dan Beachy-Quick

Monday, April 8, 2024 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books
The Ancient Exchanges speaker series presents poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick, who will talk about his work. Dan Beachy-Quick's translations from ancient Greek include the lyric collection Stone Garland and The Thinking Root, a collection of fragments of early philosophy (both from Milkweed Editions), as well as most recently Wind--Mountain--Oak: The Poems of Sappho (Tupelo Press, 2023). Of his approach to translation, Beachy-Quick writes, "There are depths within the denotative life of...