Prairie Lights

Join us for the International Writing Program’s Prairie Lights Reading Series this Sunday to hear readings by two 2023 Fall Residency writers and one University of Iowa MFA student.

Yashika Graham (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual artist; Jamaica), the winner of the 2019 Mervyn Morris Prize for Poetry, has also received a Centrum Writer’s Residency. Her poetry, prose, and literary criticism have been published internationally; her debut collection Some of Us Can Go Back Home is forthcoming from Blouse & Skirt Books.

Li Kotomi (novelist, essayist, translator; Taiwan/ Japan) is the author of Hitorimai, published in 2022 as Solo Dance, Porarisu ga furisosogu yoru [Night of the Shining North Star] (2020), and Higanbana ga saku shima [The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom] (2021). She is the winner of the Akutagawa Prize. Kotomi writes in Japanese, self-translating her work into Mandarin. .

Derick Edgren Otero is a third-year MFA candidate in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Most recently a 2023 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat Playwriting Fellow and recipient of the KCACTF Region V Latinx Playwriting Award, their bilingual play Mother:Knife, developed with La MaMa Umbria, premiered in the University of Iowa’s Gallery Series in October 2022.