PrairieLights: IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series

Please join us for our annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Zodwa Nyoni (Zimbabwe, United Kingdom), Jun Li (Hong Kong), and Ingeborg von Zadow (Germany). They will be accompanied by Iowa Playwrights Workshop MFA candidate Darrin Terpstra.

Zodwa Nyoni is a Zimbabwean-born writer and director whose multidisciplinary work spans theatre, film, radio, and opera. She first rose to prominence with her debut play, Boi Boi is Dead, which won the Channel 4 Playwrights’ Scheme and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Since, her plays have been staged across Europe, Africa, and North America. In 2025, she premiered three projects:

• Liberation:  Manchester International Festival production exploring the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress, nominated for Best Playwright at the Black British Theatre Awards and Alfred Fagon Award finalist.
• Tears Are Not Meant to Stay Inside: An opera focused on ancestral healing for Buxton International Festival.
• Castlevania: Nocturne:  Series 2 of Netflix’s spin off animated series set during the French Revolution.

Zodwa has directed three short films, including the award-winning short The Ancestors. It won Jurors’ Choice for Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking at Women of African Descent Film Festival (Brooklyn, NY); and Best Film at Sacramento Pan African International Film Festival. She is a BAFTA Connect member and former Oxbelly International Fellow (Greece). Zodwa supports multidisciplinary artists and writers as a Lecturer in Scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University and freelance dramaturg and script editor.

Jun Li is a Hong Kong writer director. His film works include Tracey (2018), Drifting (2021), and Queerpanorama (2025). He won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director at the 58th and 62nd Golden Horse Film Awards for the latter two. His theatre works include Song of Grief (2018-2019) and In a Perfect World (2025). He won Best Play and Best Script for the later at the 34th Hong Kong Drama Awards.

Ingeborg von Zadow is an internationally renowned playwright based in the UNESCO City of Literature Heidelberg, Germany. Born in Berlin and educated bilingually in Germany, the USA and Belgium, she holds an M.A. in Theater from State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. The Agent/Publisher Verlag der Autoren in Frankfurt a.M., Germany started representing her professionally at the age of 22, after she had spent her youth writing and performing. Her plays, often written for young audiences, have themes such as friendship, the actions of human beings and the way of the world. They focus on core emotional experiences and capture moments of growth and self-awareness through humor, rhythm and theatrical imagination. The plays have been staged in more than 150 professional national and international productions and translated into 12 languages.
She won the Brothers-Grimm-Prize of the State of Berlin and was nominated for the German Children’s Theater Prize and the Mülheimer Children’s Plays Prize. Ingeborg von Zadow is spokesperson of the Heidelberg Authors, and director of the youth program Heidelberger Literaturscouts.

A Korean-American playwright from Des Moines, Iowa, Darrin Terpstra is a third-year MFA candidate in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, a recipient of the Hansberry-Lilly Fellowship, and a two-times O’Neill semifinalist. Their work has a primary focus in queer narratives, deconstructions of Christianity, and immigrant metaphors.