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More than 40 Pulitzer Prize winners. Seven U.S. Poet Laureates. Countless award-winning playwrights, nonfiction writers, screenwriters, memoirists, journalists, translators, novelists and poets. Iowa is The Writing University®.

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Publish your work. Break the big story. Produce a film. Write the next great American novel. Secure a scientific grant. You can do it all at the University of Iowa.

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Readings, talks and presentations are happening all around Iowa City.

 

Upcoming Events

AI Is Not Your Friend: Cautions and Vents about Its Uses and Abuses in the Creation of Scholarly Publications promotional image

AI Is Not Your Friend: Cautions and Vents about Its Uses and Abuses in the Creation of Scholarly Publications

Tuesday, October 6, 2026 3:00pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

On Tuesday, Oct. 6, from 3 to 4 p.m. at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press, will offer his perspective as both a longtime acquiring editor and as a writer on how the advent of AI affects the present and possible futures of scholarly publishing. In particular, he will discuss how the emerging technology creates concerns and unresolved tensions — ethical, legal, and otherwise — in publishing around intellectual property...

Live from Prairie Lights |  Meghan O’Gieblyn in conv with Dr. Alison Lynch - "Will and Attention" promotional image

Live from Prairie Lights | Meghan O’Gieblyn in conv with Dr. Alison Lynch - "Will and Attention"

Thursday, October 8, 2026 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Meghan O’Gieblyn in conv with Dr. Alison Lynch - Will and Attention
Meghan O’Gieblyn will read from her new memoir, Will and Attention, and will be joined in conversation with Dr. Alison Lynch. Described as a "luminous memoir of secret drinking, fragile recovery, and the deep pull of religion," Will and Attention is praised by bestselling author Jia Tolentino as "one of the best memoirs of the decade," while University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program professor and bestselling author Melissa Febos says: "An elegant and philosophical memoir about addiction whose stakes are no less than what comprises one's will to live, what it means to be good, and the worth of devotion. I savored equally O'Gieblyn's sentences and the turns of her thought—at once precise as the cut of a razor and as pleasurably discursive as Montaigne."
Global Express promotional image

Global Express

Thursday, October 8, 2026 7:30pm
Theatre Building

Students from the UI Department of Theatre Arts bring the page to life in an evening of staged readings of work by the International Writing Program Fall Residents.

Global Express is a unique opportunity for writers from around the world and performers at Iowa to meet, work together, and present their work live on stage. Global Express, now, in its 25th year, help us to recognize our common humanity while celebrating our differences. The Express, part dramatic reading, part solo-turn, part poetry...

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