Denis Johnson, the prize-winning fiction writer, poet, and playwright best known for his transcendent story collection Jesus’ Son, has died at 67. He was a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and studied under Raymond Carver, whose raw accounts of addiction and recovery would be echoed in Johnson’s work.
Mgbechi Erondu received a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2016 and will graduate this month from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She hopes to use both fields—fiction writing and medicine—to remind the world of how much people matter to one another.
The U.K. House of Commons has long used vellum, made of calfskin, to record its acts—but some parliamentarians believe it’s finally tree time. Professor Timothy Barrett, a University of Iowa expert on European paper, says well-made paper stored somewhere cool with low humidity will survive for centuries, if not millennia.
