Poets & Writers announced on July 14 the winners of the 2023 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award: David Ehmcke for poetry and Jesus “Chuy” Renteria for fiction.

The Smithsonian Visionary Award will be presented to two outstanding metal artists, including Chunghi Choo, University of Iowa F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Art and an elected fellow of the American Craft Council. Choo is being recognized as a metalsmith who creates aesthetically and technically unique metal artworks using electroforming to produce fluid, organic shapes.

Her name is Caitlin Clark. She was just named the Naismith Player of the Year, for the top women’s b-baller in the country. And if you watch her this Friday night against the undefeated South Carolina on ESPN in the NCAA women’s Final Four, bring your inhaler, because she’ll take your breath away.

As last Sunday’s NCAA Elite Eight game between the Iowa and Louisville women’s basketball teams unfolded, the court at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena seemed to become a Broadway stage with an invisible spotlight tracking one player: the Hawkeyes’ Caitlin Clark.

To get an idea of just how intoxicating Caitlin Clark’s game is, all you had to do Sunday — if you weren’t near a TV to watch her pile up 41 points, hand out 12 assists and grab 10 rebounds — was scroll Twitter.

Caitlyn Clark’s numbers this season have made her a candidate to be the national women’s player of the year. When she is on a roll, she is able to make the game easier for her teammates — and almost impossible for her opponents.

Before Caitlin Clark was making her case as college basketball’s most thrilling talent, she was a middle child in West Des Moines, Iowa, who insisted on tagging along with her two brothers and countless cousins. The 21-year-old junior guard, who has risen to national prominence thanks to her Stephen Curry-esque shooting range and video game-like statistics, spent summers bicycling and winters...

In a recent PBS installment of Amanpour and Company, Tara Bynum, professor of English and African American Studies at Iowa, talks about her new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, which explores the ways that four early Black writers named and expressed happiness and joy despite being enslaved.

In this interview with NPR, Derek (DK) Nnuro talks about his debut novel, What Napoleon Could Not Do, a book that depicts how America is seen through the eyes of three characters with African ties. Nnuro is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, teaches writing at Iowa, and is curator of special projects at the Stanley Museum of Art.