Nancy Miller Gomez grew up in Kansas, but currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and her chapbook, Punishment, was published as part of

  Featuring IWP Residents: Lisa ALLEN-AGOSTINI (fiction writer, poet, editor; Trinidad and Tobago) is the author of the historical noir novella Death in the Dry River (2024), the young adult novel Home Home (2020), and the domestic noir novel The Bread the Devil Knead (2021), which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in

Typedancing is a collaborative interdisciplinary performance featuring musicians, poets, dancers and visual artists making music with and dancing to obsolete office equipment. With audience participation, it also includes live-produced zines from the artifacts of the performance.

Join the Eisner-nominated comic and tv creator--and Sioux City native--as he reads a selection of short comics, including We Are Not Alone (now a short film, with its Iowa premiere at the Refocus Film Festival). Followed by a Q&A and signing. Presented in partnership with Daydreams Comics and Refocus Film Festival

A presentation by University of Iowa Professor Venise Berry and S. Toriano Berry, a professor emeritus at Howard University. Includes a screening of the hour-long film and a post-screening Q&A with the Berrys. The nature of racial ideology has changed in our society. Yes, there are still ugly racists who push uglier racism, but there

Amanda Jones has been an educator for 23 years, at the same middle school she attended as a child. She has served as President of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians and won numerous awards for her work in school libraries, including School Library Journal Librarian of the Year. A sought-after keynote speaker, Amanda is

Christopher Merrill has published eight collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and On the Road to Lviv; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey

Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the author of Homesick, a Saroyan Prize winner, and numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University

Josh Cowen is Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, and an author on topics related to education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States. In addition to each of the major academic outlets in his research field, his popular writing has appeared in outlets such as The Conversation, the Dallas

Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer is a writer who lives in New Orleans. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University, where she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. Formerly, she taught English at the East Oakland School of the Arts, Castlemont High School, Life Academy, and GW Carver

A discussion on film criticism and writing, featuring accomplished film writers Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) and Marya E. Gates (RogerEbert.com) moderated by Ariana Martinez of Little Village.  

Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. The collection is on the 2024 Longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer