PorchLight: International Lights Salon Series
September 19 @ 7:00 pm
Enjoy conversation, connection, and community over light snacks and wine. A collaboration with the International Writing Program, the International Lights Salon provides a space for visiting International writers, local artists, university students, and community members to engage in dialogue.
Join online or in person. For a zoom link email Jennifer at jennifer@porchlightliterary.org
September 19th’s topic will revolve around queer aesthetics in writing and creating queer writing communities. The conversationalists will be:
Iván HOCHMAN (b. 1994, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an actor, writer, screenwriter, director, and teacher. His play Decir te amo es un atentado received a National Playwriting Award from the Teatro Nacional Cervantes and was presented at the Bienal de Arte Joven. He was selected for the Cannes Writers Club at Canneseries (2024) for his work as a screenwriter. His first novel, Por qué te vas (Milena Caserola, 2020; Alfaguara, 2023), was included in the Mapa de las Lenguas collection (2024). His second novel, Años luz que no brillamos, is forthcoming from Alfaguara. He starred in the Netflix series Love After Music, for which he received several acting awards. He is currently working on a science fiction short story collection and two feature films. He teaches creative writing and mentors long-form literary projects.
Hidayat Nordin is a Singaporean writer, theatre director, and cultural practitioner working across fiction, poetry, performance, and film in Malay and English. In 2025, he won the Golden Point Award — Singapore’s most prestigious literary prize — taking both First Prize and Honourable Mention in short fiction in the same year. He was appointed Duta Bahasa (Malay Language Ambassador) by MBMS in 2025, in recognition of his sustained contribution to the Malay language and literary arts in Singapore.
His poetry has appeared in publications across Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, including a solo collection, Optimis (2020), supported by the National Arts Council. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Aras Theatre and co-founder of Meja Conteng, a writers’ collective that has produced three publications and a nationwide poetry competition since its founding in 2024. A practitioner of dikir barat — a Malay oral performance tradition of call and response — he has also represented Singapore internationally at literary festivals in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Perak.
Lionel Ruffel is a French literary scholar, publisher, and writer. He is the author of three essays on contemporary literature and culture: Le Dénouement (Verdier, 2005), Volodine post-exotique (Cécile Defaut, 2007) Brouhaha, les mondes du contemporain (Verdier, 2016, Minnesota Press, 2017), and three hybrid books that combine memoir, literary essay, and political fable: Trompe-la-mort (Verdier, 2019), I Can’t Sleep (Sternberg Press, 2021), and Trois éveils (Corti, 2024). His next book, Auto-évaluations, will be published in January 2027. Since 2005, he runs the chaoïd series (which focuses on new voices and emerging literature) at Verdier publishing house where he’s also an associate publisher. He is a professor of comparative literature and creative writing at Paris 8 University, where he co-founded the master’s program in creative writing in 2013 and has been co-director ever since.
Johanna Kasimow is an Iowa City-based director, writer, and performer in the field of theater and performance. Her recent creative research focuses on the interplay of clown and affect in performance in a new play titled The Grüb, which probes the sensations of hiding, trans-generational inheritance, and the rhythms of survival in an underground pit.
Johanna has worked with artists and companies across the US, including: Pig Iron Theatre Company, The Eva Steinmetz Project, Antigravity Performance Project, Tiny Circus, New Paradise Laboratories, Nell Bang-Jensen, Talya Chalef, Lily Kind, and Alex Tatarsky. In 2023, Johanna was a participant in the NEH Summer Institute for Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre hosted by the Pig Iron Theatre Company. Recently, Johanna premiered City In Heat, a site-specific live cinema performance piece, as part of the Open Air Media Festival at Public Space One in Iowa City.
Johanna’s teaching and research has focused on clown and mask; civic and social practice art; community-based theatre; theatre of the climate crisis; and contemporary performance. Johanna received an MFA in Devised Performance from the University of the Arts/Pig Iron School in Philadelphia and is an Assistant Professor of Directing in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa.
