6 minute read
Faculty & Staff Bios
FACULTY
RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA is a fiction writer and literary translator from Skopje, North Macedonia. An author of four volumes of short stories translated into several languages, her collection My Husband has been published in the USA, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the former Yugoslav republics and has been adapted into three stage productions in Ljubljana, Belgrade and Skopje. A 2018 resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she is a professor of American literature and Translation at the State University in Skopje. She is the co-author and coorganizer of the women’s storytelling event PeachPreach.
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MARY HICKMAN was born in Idaho and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Hickman is the author of two books of poems, This Is the Homeland (2015) and Rayfish (2017), which won the James Laughlin Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and chosen by Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, and Carmen Giménez Smith. An assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, she also teaches in (and loves!) the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program
FACULTY
FACULTY
VLADIMIR POLEGANOV is a Bulgarian writer, translator, and screenwriter. He is the author of one collection of short stories, The Deconstruction of Thomas S (2013) and the novel The Other Dream (2016), which won the 2017 Helikon Award for Best Fiction Book. His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. “The Birds”, was featured in Dalkey Archive Press’ 2016 anthology Best European Fiction. In 2016, he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, followed by residencies in Shanghai and at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. He has translated novels by Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Octavia Butler and others into Bulgarian. In 2020, his translation of Lincoln in the Bardo won the Association of Bulgarian Translators Prize. He is currently working on a PhD in Bulgarian literature at Sofia University, where he also teaches courses on creative writing and literature of the fantastic.
SHANDANA MINHAS’ first novel ‘Tunnel Vision’ was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Her novel ‘Survival Tips for Lunatics’ became the first children’s book to win a General Fiction Prize in South Asia, taking the Karachi Literature Festival Fiction Prize in 2015. Her other books are ‘Daddy’s Boy’ and the novella ‘Rafina’, which was adapted into the feature film Good Morning Karachi. Her essays, columns and short fiction have appeared in publications including EPW, Herald, IQ, and the Griffith Review. Her work has been translated into Italian and Estonian and adapted for theatre and cinema. An IWP fellow in 2013, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.
FACULTY
BTL TEACHING ASSISTANT
SEAN ZHURAW is a poet, teacher, and baker. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Boston Review, TYPO, agape, and in the glass pastry case of Day by Day, his family’s restaurant. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches English at the Community College of Philadelphia and lives with his husband in West Philadelphia.
DELANEY NOLAN got her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2016, and is currently a teacher and editor located in New Orleans. She has taught online classes with Catapult, and in 2020 was a BTL counselor. She has also taught writing with Iowa Young Writers Program, with IWP in Morocco, as a Fulbright specialist in Moscow, and elsewhere.
BTL TEACHING ASSISTANT
BTL TEACHING ASSISTANT
ALEA ADIGWEME is an anti-disciplinary IgboVincentian-U.S.-ian cultural worker active in the fields of creative writing, book arts, performance, installation, and visual media. She’s the author of the poetry chapbook birdbolt idolatry (dancing girl press, 2015); her media work has been exhibited at Public Space One in Iowa City. Her first experimental short film, [untitled], screened in competition at the 31st-annual New Orleans Film Festival. After earning a BA in Russian literature at Reed College, adigweme earned an MFA in nonfiction writing, an MA in Media Studies, and a graduate certificate in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality studies from the University of Iowa. She is currently based in Tovaangar, the unceded Tongva territory commonly known as Los Angeles, where she is a second-year MFA student in interdisciplinary studio art at UCLA.
GYASI HALL is an essayist, poet, playwright, and breakfast food enthusiast from Columbus, Ohio. His work has been published/produced by Thoughtcrime press, Get Lit, Z Publishing, and MabLab Theater, among others. His debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in spring 2019. He is the former poetry editor of Quiz and Quill, as well as a 3 year veteran faculty member of Kenyon College’s Young Writers Summer Workshop. He currently resides in Iowa City where he is pursuing his MFA in Nonfiction.
BTL TEACHING ASSISTANT
IWP YOUTH PROGRAMS COORDINATOR
ALISA WEINSTEIN received a BFA in Drama and MA in Educational Theatre from New York University, and a PhD in Anthropology from Syracuse University; she also studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and conducted dissertation research in India on a FulbrightNehru scholarship. Among her other writing, she authored scripts for India’s Sesame Street, Galli Galli Sim Sim, and is currently at work on an ethnography of tailors working in Jaipur, India. A co-founder of Home Ec. Workshop in Iowa City, she often teaches knitting and sewing to crafters of all ages.
CAITLIN PLATHE received her BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. An alumna of IWP’s Between the Lines program, she has held several assistantship positions at IWP for the last four years. She is also the author of I Am No Plath, a volume of poems.
BTL PROGRAM ASSISTANT
BTL SUMMER ASSISTANT
SARAH ADLER received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently pursuing her MFA in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work explores a variety of topics, including identity-making on the Internet, the role of contemporary art in society, and gendered modes of interpersonal communication.
GEORGIE FEHRINGER received a BA in Creative Writing from The Evergreen State College. She is an MFA candidate and Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing is experimental poetic prose with a focus on physical form; it has appeared or is forthcoming from The Black Warrior Review, TIMBER, and Entropy Magazine. She is Co-Creator and lead editor at Pixel and Fragment press and has a love for all things book binding letterpress and design.
