What Napoleon Could Not Do, a literary novel written by Derek (DK) Nnuro, curator of special projects at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, recently received a unique honor when President Barak Obama named it to his 2023 summer reading list.

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 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) has announced E Cram as the winner of its 2023 Book Award for their 2022 work titled Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy, and the Making of the North American West. This award is presented annually to the best publication by an RSA member published during the current academic year.

The Daily Iowan won top honors in seven of nine categories—including best student newspaper, best TV newscast, and best website—in a regional journalism competition run by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).

Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at Iowa, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her novel, The Family Chao.

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.

Shehan Karunatilaka, spring 2022 resident of the University of Iowa International Writing Program (IWP), has been honored with the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel, "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida."

A faculty member in the University of Iowa Department of English has published a book that argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar U.S. literature.

University of Iowa Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies Tara Bynum began a nine-month term as the Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies on Sept. 1.