More than 140 high school students from around Iowa, the U.S., and countries like Italy, China, South Korea, and Canada have come to the University of Iowa to learn at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. The students spend two weeks honing their craft and immersing themselves in Iowa City culture.
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.
