Corban Addison

Corban Addison is the international bestselling author of four novels, A Walk Across the Sun, The Garden of Burning Sand, The Tears of Dark Water, and A Harvest of Thorns, and one work of narrative nonfiction, Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial. His books have been published in more than twenty-five countries and have won multiple awards. They address some of today’s most pressing issues of justice and human rights.

Corban holds a law degree from the University of Virginia and an engineering degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. After completing a judicial clerkship, he spent six years trying cases in the courtroom before turning to writing full-time. He is a supporter of numerous causes, including environmental justice and the abolition of modern slavery. He lives with his wife and children in Virginia.

The Fall 2024 One Community, One Book selection is “Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial,” by Corban Addison. This event will be hosted in person at the University of Iowa. This event is free and open to the public and sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, Hubbell Environmental Law Initiative, and the Iowa City Book Festival. Sunday, October 20, 3:00 – 4:15pm CST Doors will open at 2:30 p.m. Author Keynote will begin at 3:00 p.m. and will last approximately 75 minutes. Author book signing will occur immediately following the lecture. More information at: https://uichr.uiowa.edu/programs/one-community-one-book

Anna Barker

Professor Anna Barker teaches in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Russian Program and in the UI Tippie College of Business Marketing Program on topics ranging from Tolstoy to Barbie. Her current courses include Introduction to Russian Culture, Russian Literature in Translation, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and Hey Barbie, I Like Your Style – AND Substance: The Archetypal Genius of a Blockbuster.

Since 2003, she has taught UI courses in the Department of English, Comparative Literature, University College, and the Honors Program and organized a diverse array of literary programs in collaboration with UI Libraries Special Collections, UI Stanley Museum of Art, UI Old Capitol Museum, UI Symphony, UI Opera Studies Forum, UI International Programs WorldCanvass, UI Senior College, IC UNESCO City of Literature, IC Book Festival, Music IC, FilmScene, Riverside Theatre, and Cedar Rapids Opera.

Ari Berman

Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He’s the author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. He’s won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Magazine Journalism and an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. He lives in New Paltz, New York.

Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander’s book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels (As a Friend; The Trace), essays (A Faithful Existence) and translates. Recent translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido, and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.

Gander’s books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University before becoming The Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught courses such as Poetry & Ethics, EcoPoetics, Latin American Death Trip, and Translation Theory & Practice. He is an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy for the Academy of American Poets and is an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Gander co-edited Lost Roads Publishers with CD Wright for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Frances Mayes, Steve Stern, Zuleyka Benitez, and René Char.

Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. A student of Zen Buddhism for 24 years, she trained intensively with Katagiri Roshi for 12 years, and is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh. Natalie Goldberg teaches writing workshops nationally based on the methods presented in Writing Down the Bones. Her other books include Wild Mind; Long Quiet Highway; Banana Rose; and Living Color.

Amanda Jones

Amanda Joneshas 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 a frequent volunteer for state and national library associations, as well as a co-founder of the Livingston Parish Library Alliance and founding member of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She lives in Livingston Parish, Louisiana.

Bruna Dantas Lobato

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator.

Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Other translations have received the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic in the U.S, Companhia das Letras/PRH in Brazil (in her own translation into Portuguese), and İş Kültür in Turkey. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common, and has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Jentel, A Public Space, NYU, Disquiet International, and more.

She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, and a BA in Literature from Bennington College. She has taught at NYU, Bennington College, Bread Loaf, the Center for Fiction, and Catapult, and is currently an incoming Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Grinnell College. Born and raised in Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa with her partner and pet bunny.

Nicolás Medina Mora

Nicolás Medina Mora was born and raised in Mexico City. He has degrees from Yale University and the writing program of the University of Iowa, and has worked in New York City as a journalist at Reuters and BuzzFeed. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, and n+1, where he won the 2023 n+1 Writers’ Fellowship for outstanding contributions. He currently lives in Mexico City, where he is a writer and editor for Revista Nexos.

Marc Ribot

Marc Ribot, who the New York Times describes as “a deceptively articulate artist who uses inarticulateness as an expressive device,” has released 25 albums under his own name over a 40 – year career, exploring everything from the pioneering jazz of Albert Ayler to the Cuban son of Arsenio Rodríguez. His solo release, “ Silent Movies ” (Pi Recording 2010) has been described as a “down – in – mouth – near master piece” by the Village Voice and has landed on several Best of 2010 lists including the LA Times and critical praise across the board, and 2014 saw the monumental release: Marc Ribot Trio Live at the Village Vanguard (Pi Recordings), documenting Marc’s first headline and the return of Henry Grimes at the historical venue in 2012 and included on Best of 2014 lists such as Downbeat Magazine and NPR ’s 50 Favorites.

2018 saw the release of two politically charged albums: “ YRU Still Here? ” (Northern Spy), the long awaited third album from Ribot’s post – rock/noise trio Ceramic Dog, and “ Songs of Resistance 1942 – 2018 ” (featuring guest vocalists Tom Waits , Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello and more on Anti – Records) voicing anger and outrage during these turbulent times, and both albums landing on various Best of 2018 lists including NPR’s All Songs Considered.

2021 continues with a flurry of releases including Ceramic Dog’s “HOPE”, recorded during the pandemic, plus two reissues on vinyl for the first time: 1993’s long out – of – print “Marc Ribot Plays Solo Guitar Works of Frantz Casseus” & “Silent Movies” (2010). Additionally, Marc’s first collection of writings, “Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist”, will be published by Akashic Books this August with an audiobook also in the works, and Marc’s original score for limited series documentary, “Queen of Meth”, will premiere on the Discovery Channel.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She spent seven years working in the Obama Administration on issues of homelessness and Native policy. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She currently teaches public policy at the University of Iowa. The Indian Card is her first book.

Willy Vlautin