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.

In 2021, in collaboration with the UI Libraries Special Collections, Professor Barker curated the exhibition “From Revolutionary Outcast to a Man of God: Dostoevsky at 200” which attracted over 6,000 visitors. Her fall 2024 Substack commentary is dedicated to the 160th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (1864) and its impact on the composition of “Crime and Punishment” (1866).

Since 2020, Professor Barker’s online tutorials examining the intersection of literature, history, and culture in classics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary, Les Misérables, War and Peace, and Brothers Karamazov reached over 7,500 readers around the globe. Her monthly column “Anna’s Thinking Cap” dedicated to Iowa’s French and Napoleonic past is published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

Carolyn Chalmers

This deeply personal memoir of a pioneering sexual harassment case reveals just how recently women’s rights have been won – and at what cost.

Before the nation first learned about sexual harassment from Anita Hill and decades before the #metoo movement, Jean Y. Jew M.D., a Chinese American professor in the College of Medicine, brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against the University of Iowa. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer.

In the face of a university indifferent to Jean’s injuries and then determined to defeat her, these two women pursued a landmark civil-rights battle at the dawn of sexual harassment law. The professional, academic workplace; the combination of sex, race and ethnic discrimination; and their extraordinary relationship, make this account deeply compelling. 

Sometimes suing, and other times advising universities on sex discrimination issues, Carolyn Chalmers’ legal career spanned four decades before she turned to writing. She received her JD from the University of Minnesota Law School. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and near her two grown children and their families.

Art Cullen

We have fouled our nest over the past half century in a way that was almost unavoidable, given our history of seeking domination — first over the Indigenous people of the Western World, then over their land. Native people for millennia lived with the land in a vital relationship. Europeans set out to transform that relationship brutally, and this destruction has reached a head. We simply cannot go on like this, washing our soil down the river while the planet bakes, ignoring our own immigration story.

As Art writes, “Fifty years around a small town amid the teeming waves of golden corn, a lot has changed, but corn remains king, just like when we were in school. But the place we knew is gone, that world of family farms and the Saturday livestock auction. We are the poorer for it. This is how it went down, or at least how I put it down, in notes compiled over this strange time from Irving Street just up from the lake in the small town we called home.”

Art Cullen is editor and co-owner with older brother John of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in rural Northwest Iowa. Art is a Storm Lake native, where he graduated from St. Mary’s High School with his pal Marty Case. Art won the Pulitzer Price in 2017 for a series of editorials about agricultural surface water pollution in Iowa. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and regional publications. He authored a journalistic memoir, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.

Johanna Drucker

Affluvia is a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” Approximately 60,000 words, the text is focused entirely on tracking the ecological costs of the author making coffee and feeding her cats every morning. The actions take less than ten minutes, but they are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts—the lifecycle of the beans, coffee grinder, coffee maker, pet food, aluminum can, label, bowls and spoon—and profiles each in turn.

Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. She has held faculty positions at Columbia University, Yale University, the University of Virginia and been the recipient of fellowships from Harvard, the Beinecke Library, the Getty, and Fulbright.

Jennifer Fawcett

One hot August night in 1993, a young couple go to a party. When their car breaks down, they are picked up by a truck driver who attacks the man and abducts the woman. She is never seen again.

That woman was Fiona Green’s mother.

When the trucker, Eddie Ward, is caught, a mass grave of bodies is discovered in his backyard but Fiona’s mother isn’t there. Thirty years later, on his prison deathbed, Ward insists that he didn’t kill her, so Fiona finds herself back in the small town where her mother disappeared. Fighting demons of her own, she’s shocked when history repeats itself: another woman, another roadside breakdown, and another disappearance. Only this time the primary suspect is Jason Ward, Eddie’s son. Desperate, Fiona hunts down answers, unaware that she is being drawn into a dangerous trap.

Jennifer Fawcett grew up in rural Eastern Ontario and spent many years in Canada making theatre before coming to the United States. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her work has been produced in theaters across the country and published in Third Coast Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Storybrink, and in the anthology Long Story Short. She teaches writing at Skidmore College and lives in upstate New York with her husband and son.

Donika Kelley

What does a life look like on the other side of survival, and can the one who survived come to recognize that she did?

Donika Kelly’s poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world.

Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Jewell Parker Rhodes

Dr. Jewell Parker Rhodes is an award-winning and bestselling author and educator for both youth and adults. She is the author of seven books for children including the New York Times bestsellers Black Brother, Black Brother and Ghost Boys which has won over 50 honors and awards. Her other books include Soul Step, Treasure Island: Runaway Gold, Paradise on Fire, Towers Falling, the celebrated Louisiana Girls Trilogy: Ninth Ward, Sugar, and Bayou Magic. Her latest novel for young readers Will’s Race for Home. 

Rhodes is the author of six adult novels: Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass’ Women, Season, Moon, and Hurricane, as well as the memoir Porch Stories: A Grandmother’s Guide to Happiness, and two writing guides, Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Non-Fiction. 

She is the recipient of several awards including the American Book Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Award for Literary Excellence, a Coretta Scott King Honor Award, the Jane Addams Peace Association Book Award, an NAACP Image Award Nomination, the Green Earth Book Award, and the Octavia E. Butler Award for Speculative Fiction and Fantasy. 

Rhodes has visited hundreds of schools across the country and is a regular speaker at colleges and conferences. The driving force behind all of her work is to inspire social justice, equity, and environmental stewardship.

Rhodes is the Founding Artistic Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and Narrative Studies Professor and Virginia G. Piper Endowed Chair at Arizona State University. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Carnegie-Mellon University. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Seattle. 

John Scalzi

For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. A tripartite agreement between the Colonial Union, the Earth, and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay, even when some would have preferred to return to the fighting and struggle of former times. For now, more sensible heads have prevailed – and have even championed unity.

But now, there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu, the most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met, are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war. This war is between Consu factions… but nothing the Consu ever do is just about them. The Colonial Union, the Earth and the Conclave have been unwillingly dragged into the conflict, in the most surprising of ways.

Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of humans and aliens alike… or destroy them forever.

John Scalzi is one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation. His novels, which include the enduring Old Man’s War series, have won numerous accolades, including the Hugo and Locus awards. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel), The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain. His latest releases are When the Moon Hits Your Eye and The Shattering Peace.

Tatiana Scholote-Bonne

So what if Sadie hears talking dead animals and a strange, comforting male voice in her head? The therapist insists these are just symptoms of PTSD. It makes sense considering that she hid under the bed and watched as her best friends were slaughtered.

But the murders were seventeen years ago, back when her name was Sabrina. Now, she’s Sadie: a perfectly normal 29-year-old. She works as a physical therapist assistant and lifts weights with her boyfriend, Lucas, who’s the sweetest, most considerate man—as long as he’s not angry. But when Lucas spontaneously agrees to join a couples trip to a cabin in the woods, the visions get worse, a strange figure stalks her during the night, and that male voice in Sadie’s head keeps calling, asking her to do things she’s never fathomed.

Sadie’s not sure if it’s her paranoia or something else entirely . . . But she is sure of one thing—this time, she’s not going to sit idly by as everything starts to unravel.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is the author of the YA horror novel, Such Lovely Skin, and the forthcoming adult horror novel, The Mean Ones (September 2025). She has an MFA from The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When she’s not writing, she’s either gaming, lifting heavy weights, or teaching people how to lift heavy weights. She’s the proud parent of two cats, Momo and Yuri.