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.

Orit Gidali (poet, children’s book author, editor; Israel) is the author, most recently, of the poetry volume התאומים [The Towers ] (2021); Twenty Girls to Envy Me, a Hebrew-English edition of her collected poems, was longlisted for the 2017 PEN America Literary Award. She also writes children’s books, receiving in 2022 the Dvora Omer Award for [Kind of a Unicorn].

Suo Er (fiction; editor; PRC) is the author of the novel 伐木之夜 [The Night of the Felling] and the story collection 非亲非故 [Noncorrelation]. His works have appeared in China’s top literary magazines and received many awards. His writing concerns itself with the dispersion of cultures, and with lives of individuals in a “Southern framework.”

The Argentinian writer Sofia Balbuena has a degree in Political Science from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a MA in Literary Creation (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona). She has worked as a bookseller, and a reader for publishing houses in Spain specializing in contemporary Latin American literature. Her book-length essay Doce pasos hacia mí was published in 2022 by the Argentina-based Vinilo.