"During my time at the residency, I am eager to explore the local countryside and visit nearby farms to immerse myself in the regional ecology."

"I think a daily, dedicated writing practice, and the time and space to do this consistently, will create good momentum for my novel."

"I think I will find both the space to focus on my writing and a motivating environment to share with other writers."

"My focus during the residency is to pivot into fiction. To date, I have worked in theatre, screen and opera. Thematically, I explore African diasporic identities, folklore, womanhood, politics, class, migration and liminality."

"I love experimenting with and blending different forms of art and genres. So you'll find theatrical elements in my audiovisual works and multimedia elements in my stage works."

"I stay open to moments. A color, a sentence, a smell: any of these might begin a piece of writing."

"I love experimenting with and blending different forms of art and genres. So you'll find theatrical elements in my audiovisual works and multimedia elements in my stage works."

"I write to depict the reality in my country. My philosophy as a writer is that I write to liberate and enlighten my people."

"As macabre as it may sound, I spent countless days listening to them discuss true crime, the criminal justice system—and the riot in particular: who they knew, what had happened, theories about why."

"The novel covers the brief and tragic episode of their relationship, their hardscrabble existence and their attempt to start a family."

"I found inspiration for this book through my own process of sitting in spaces of ambivalence over the question of whether or not to mother."

"I found myself reflecting on the dilemma that artists who pen memoirs must face when writing explicitly about actual people whom they had sexual relations with."

"I love how the university's campus is integrated into downtown. When I noticed this during my orientation, it made everything so much more lively."

"As editor, I gathered the stories from collections of Williams works at the University of Texas and Harvard University. The process of editing included sifting through Williams’s original notes and revisions to ascertain the most effective telling of each story."

"I’ve been teaching a course called the Award-Winning Short Story, which is a workshop where we’ve been studying some of the guidelines of what might make a story stand out..."

"I am not a daily writer. I am a marathon writer. I prefer large, uninterrupted chunks of time to fully immerse myself and get into a flow."

"I gave Cindy's eulogy—I was 18 years old—and the job never quite felt finished."

"I’m working on a collection of essays about faith, art, and conversion—more specifically, about the way devotional art can act as a sort of vehicle for “translating” religious ideas into a vocabulary that’s more hospitable to secular audiences."

"Giving myself permission to experiment with something new—like writing an essay in the form of dictionary entries modeled after Bob Flanagan's The Book of Medicine—is so exciting and invigorating."

"I knew in high school that I wanted to study Cinema and Screenwriting, so I was looking for a university with a rigorous writing program, in a location that would foster my love for art."

"I was thrilled to come to the University of Iowa and join the awesomely diverse writing communities here (poets! novelists! essayists! comic writers!)"

"Being able to create art or write about something that directly relates to the world around me currently makes me feel like I have a special place in history."

"Translation is a craft that requires a lot of discipline and focus, and I usually try to find large chunks of time (4+ hours) rather than small increments."

"For me, the biggest source of inspiration for any translation project I’m working on is the source text itself! Translation forces you to read intimately, and you have to be quite intimate to rewrite the text in a different language."

"...the entire city seemed to glow and support its students. I fell in love with the literary walk downtown and the numerous cafes that undoubtedly housed so many aspiring writers."

"I am a near-daily journal-er; it's my precious, private place. Writing at night is akin to glory for me these days, and I love to light candles and enter my body in an extra-intentional way."

"And then I wake up, open the windows, make my coffee, think about places I’ve been and people I’ve loved. I send good morning messages, sometimes I teach Spanish classes, sometimes I go to the store to buy food for the week."

"... lately I’m getting to discover how useful can be for me to write outside from home. Some days I go to the public library of Iowa City, where I can find the silence I need to edit my texts or keep writing them. Some other days I go to cafés ..."