PrairieLights: IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series

Join them for their annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Radu Vancu (Sibiu, Romania), Harumi Kawaguchi 川口晴美 (Japan), and Amber Esau (New Zealand). They will be joined by recent Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, Lizzie Cusick.

Radu Vancu (Sibiu, Romania, 1978) is a Romanian poet, scholar, and translator. A professor in the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, he is the editor-in-chief of Transilvania magazine and an editor of Poiesis Internațional. He previously served as as the national editor of the Romanian section of the Poetry International website, and was president of PEN Romania between 2019–2023. Since 2013, he has also been president of Sibiu’s international writing festival Poets in Transylvania. Vancu has published nine volumes of poems, which have been translated into more than 20 languages in anthologies, magazines, and books. He has also published two novels, Transparenta (2018) and Paradis (2025), and his first two books of poetry in English translation will be published in the U.S. in October 2026—Kaddish (tr. Sean Cotter, Zephyr Press) and The Rope in Bloom (tr. Paula Console-Soican and Cyrus Console-Soican, Phoenix Poets).

Harumi Kawaguchi 川口晴美 is a poet based in Tokyo. Her latest poetry collection, やがて魔女の森になる (To the Witches’ Forest, Shicho-sha, 2021) received the 30th Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize in 2022, and her 13th collection, Tiger is here. (Tiger is here., Shicho-sha, 2015) won the 46th Takami Jun Prize in 2016. Her poetry explores women’s experiences and memory, while also bridging literature and popular culture, particularly manga and anime. Her poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Korean, and included in the anthologies such as Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan (Recent Work Press, 2017). She is increasingly interested in collaborative poetry translation, which she started while she was a guest for Poetry on the Move Festival in Canberra in 2017. Her collaborative translations from English to Japanese have been published in the anthologies, I am Ireland (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ireland, 2025) and pleasant troubles (Recent Work Press, 2018). She has edited several poetry anthologies and has been teaching creative writing over three decades.

Amber Esau is the author of Hungus, her debut poetry collection published earlier this year, and co-editor of a queer poetry anthology, Spoiled Fruit (2023). She has performed her poetry extensively, and her work has been published in various journals and anthologies in Aotearoa-New Zealand. She is working on a mixed media speculative fantasy novel set in the South Pacific.

Lizzie Cusick is a poet and dermatologist who recently received her MFA in from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches medical residents and fellows at the University and is interested in writing as a means of attending to both the body and natural world with deep care and close observation. She is currently working on completing her first book of poems for publication.