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

Jarod K. Anderson

Jarod K. Anderson has three best-selling collections of nature poetry, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, Love Notes from the Hollow Tree, and Leaf Litter. His memoir Something in the Woods Loves You (Timber Press/Hachette 2024) explores his lifelong struggle with depression through a lens of love and gratitude for the natural world. Jarod created and voices The CryptoNaturalist podcast, a scripted audio-fiction show about real adoration for imaginary wildlife.

Jarod has gained a large audience (over 250K followers) across social media platforms with his vivid appreciations of nature and his open, vulnerable discussions of mental health. He has had an eclectic career, ranging from teaching college English courses after earning his MA in literature, to managing marketing and events for academic and ecological nonprofits. He lives in Ohio between a park and a cemetery.

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.

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.

Steven Berry

Steven Berry is a professor emeritus from Howard University’s Film department. He has worked on a number of films, including the award-winning short, “Rich,” in which he wrote, produced and directed as well as starred. He directed “Noh Matta Wat!,” the first Belizean dramatic television series.

Venise Berry

Venise Berry is a professor in Journalism and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of three novels — So Good, An African American Love Story, All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale, and Colored Sugar Water — and nonfiction works that include The Historical Dictionary of African American Film and The 50 Most Influential Black Films.

Josh Cowen

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 Morning News, the Detroit Free Press, The Hechinger Report, the Houston Chronicle, The New Republic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, The Tennessean, the Washington Spectator and more. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family. His new book is The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.

Jennifer Croft

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 and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her debut novel is The Extinction of Irena Rey, which tells of eight translators who arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The result is a hilarious, thought-provoking tale that is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language.

Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek is the author of five books of fiction--Ecstatic Cahoots, Paper Lantern, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods–as well as two collections of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. Dybek is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers’ Award, four O. Henry Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is distinguished writer-in-residence at Northwestern University.

James Fitzmaurice

James Fitzmaurice has written a number of award-winning screenplays. They include an imagined tale of a dream Barack Obama experiences in which he is plagued by the beat poet Charles Bukowski. In another screenplay, the novelist Raymond Carver navigates a love story while living in 1960s Iowa City, a place populated by Theory Zombies. In yet another script which is set in the 1660s, Margaret Cavendish (who lived in what became the Sheffield postal code area) tries to convince a famous religious writer that witches and devils do not exist. An ex-pat American himself, Jim taught at Northern Arizona University for many years before retiring to the UK, where has been associated with the University of Sheffield. The children he raised in Sheffield are now grown and have flown the nest. This is his first novel.

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.

Nancy Miller Gomez

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 the Rattle chapbook series. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and the Juvenile Hall.

Sam Helmick

Sam Helmick is the American Library Association Council 2024-2025 president-elect. They have served as the Iowa City Public Library Community & Access Services Coordinator since September 2020. Sam is responsible for the Help Desk, Bookmobile, as well as for PR and Marketing initiatives. Preceding employment in Iowa City, Sam started their career at the Burlington Public Library in 2008 as the Youth Services Library Assistant, and in 2010 they became the Public Services Manager.

Sam is a published author on matters of Social Media Marketing and Human Resources. Sam has served on multiple committees for the American Library Association, as the Chapter Council and Intellectual Freedom chair for the Iowa Library Association, as chair of the Iowa Governor’s Commission of Libraries, and as a member of the third cohort of Library Freedom Project.

Sam has spoken internationally for library conferences on topics including intellectual freedom, social marketing, outreach, and library fundraising.

Amanda Jones

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 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.

Tracy Kidder

Over his long career, Kidder’s writing has been prolific and outstanding. The Soul of a New Machine—a book celebrated for its insight into the world of high-tech corporate America—earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1982. Other bestselling works include House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, and Home Town.

His enormously influential book Mountains Beyond Mountains captures two global health crises—tuberculosis and AIDS—through the eyes of a single-minded physician bent on improving the health of some of the poorest people on the planet. The story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a major force in revolutionizing international health, is a gripping and inspiring account of one man’s efforts to establish clinics and hospitals—his compassion for the poor, his inner circle of true believers and, ultimately, his success in helping stem the tide of new HIV and TB infections in Haiti. Farmer is the founder of Zanmi Lasante (Creole for Partners in Health), a non-governmental organization that is the only healthcare provider on the Plateau Central in Haiti.

In his following book, Strength in What Remains, Kidder delivers the humbling story of Deo, a young man whose will to survive and love of knowledge take him from the horrors of genocide in Burundi to Columbia University and then on to medical school—a brilliant testament to the power of second chances and an inspiring account of one immigrant’s remarkable American journey. Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners in Health also play a pivotal role in Deo’s story, as they inspire him to establish his own clinic in Burundi. Strength in What Remains was a finalist for both the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Award. Kidder followed that up with Good Prose, a guide to the craft of nonfiction writing, written with his longtime editor Richard Todd; and A Truck Full Of Money, the story of tech entrepreneur Paul English, who made millions during the rise of the internet while dealing with bipolar disorder.

Much as he did with Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder’s latest New York Times bestseller Rough Sleepers is the powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference. Rough Sleepers introduces readers to Dr. Jim O’Connell, who helped create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community. Today, Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues lead an organization that includes clinics affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Medical Center, and a host of teams including a street team who reach rough sleepers by van. Kidder spent time over five years riding with Dr. O’Connell as he navigated the city at night, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, and friendship to some of the city’s endangered citizens. A symptom of the systemic failures that feed American poverty—racism, childhood trauma, violence—homelessness afflicts a broad and diverse population. In Rough Sleepers we meet some of the people Dr. O’Connell has cared for over the years, including Tony, a protector of others on the streets, and Joanne, who spent many years on the streets and now lectures to each new Harvard Medical School class. Publisher’s Weekly praises Rough Sleepers as “keenly observed and fluidly written, this is a compassionate report from the front lines of one of America’s most intractable social problems.”

Born in New York City in 1945, Kidder spent his childhood in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher. He attended Harvard, where he earned a BA in 1967. From June 1968 until June 1969, he served as a lieutenant in Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star, an experience chronicled in his memoir My Detachment.

After the war, Kidder obtained his MA from the University of Iowa, where he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was there that Kidder met Atlantic contributing editor Dan Wakefield, who helped him get his first assignment as a freelance writer.

Over the years, Kidder’s articles have covered a broad array of topics, including railroads, energy, architecture, and the environment. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times.

Kidder lives with his wife in western Massachusetts.

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.

Nina Lohman

Originally from California, Nina lives in Iowa City and is the founder and publisher of Brink, a literary journal dedicated to hybrid and cross-genre writing. She serves as the Literary Programming Director for the Mission Creek Festival, an annual immersive music and literature festival honoring independent expression. A 2023 Iowa Artist Fellow, her writing has been supported by The Vermont Studio Center, The Sewanee Writers Conference, and The Iowa Arts Council. She is at work on a collection of micro-essays on the subject of release.

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.

Christopher Merrill

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 to the Holy Mountain, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Chris Offutt

Chris Offutt is the author of two collections of short stories, three memoirs, and six novels. His books have been translated into twelve languages and won four international awards. His most recent work is the acclaimed Mick Hardin series from Grove-Atlantic. He also wrote screenplays for True Blood, Weeds, and Treme. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and a Lannan Fellowship. He received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “prose that takes risks.” His work is included in many anthologies including Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Food Writing, and Modern American Memoirs. He has taught in a number of MFA programs including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi. He grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Tanya Rastogi 

Tanya Rastogi is the the 2024-25 Iowa Student Poet Ambassador. Rastogi is a student at Pleasant Valley High School in Bettendorf, Iowa. Her art and writing are published or forthcoming in several literary magazines including Gone Lawn, The Adroit Journal, Kalopsia Literary, and others. She is the founding editor of online journal The Seraphic Review. In 2023, she received a national Scholastic gold medal for her poem ‘Three Generations’.

In school, Tanya is heavily involved in the music department–she plays flute in band and is a member of choir and jazz choir. When she isn’t participating in some form of the arts, Tanya enjoys watching video essays and visiting cafes with her friends.

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.

Megan Rosenbloom

Megan Curran Rosenbloom is Collection Strategies Librarian at UCLA Library in Los Angeles. Megan served as a medical librarian for many years, where she developed a keen interest in the history of medicine and rare books. She was founding President of the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine and continues to serve on board.

Megan Rosenbloom was the co-founder and director of Death Salon, the event arm of The Order of the Good Death, and a proponent of the Death Positive movement. She leads a research team called The Anthropodermic Book Project that aims to find the historic and scientific truths behind the world’s alleged books bound in human skin, or anthropodermic bibliopegy, and her bestselling debut book about this practice, titled Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, was a New York Times Editors Choice and won the 2021 LAMPHHS Best Monograph Award. In a former life she was a journalist in Philadelphia and continues to write for both academic and non-academic publications.

Josh Sazon

Josh Sazon has done work primarily as a director, and occasionally as an actor, with a number of theater organizations in the area, including the Iowa City Community Theater, Dreamwell Theater, Run of the Mill Theater, the City Circle Acting Company of Coralville as well as the University of Iowa Department of Theater Arts. He has also produced and directed a number of productions with other organizations, including the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts, Oaknoll Retirement Residence, St. Thomas More Catholic church in Coralville and the St. Andrew Episcopal church in Iowa City.

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.

Marguerite Sheffer

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 High School.

Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, was selected by judge Jamil Jan Kochai for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and will be published in Fall 2024.

Maggie is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a local writing collective, and the Nautilus and Wildcat Writing Groups. She received her MFA from Randolph College. She was a 2023 Veasna So Scholar in Fiction at The Adroit Journal, and was selected as a top-twenty-five finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. Her story “Tiger on My Roof” was a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize, which awards emerging writers’ short fiction with “daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.”

Her position on semicolons (for) is noted in an Australian grammar textbook (pg. 16).

Willy Vlautin

Sharon Wahl

Elizabeth Willis