Program Director
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Stephen Lovely
Title/Position
Director, Iowa Young Writers' Studio
Stephen Lovely has been the Director of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio since 2005. He has led 39 sessions of the program and hosted more than 3000 students. Stephen attended Kenyon College, where he majored in English, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied with Deborah Eisenberg, Margot Livesey, Ethan Canin, and Frank Conroy. His first novel, Irreplaceable, was published by Hyperion/Voice in 2009 and translated into German, Dutch, and Chinese. Irreplaceable received the Dana Award for the Novel and a James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. Stephen currently lives in Iowa City with his wife and several dogs and cats. He is working on a second novel.
Program Staff
Teachers and counselors at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio are chosen, with rare exceptions, from among the students and graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, founded in 1936, was the first graduate creative writing program in the United States and is still regarded as one of the finest. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop typically accepts 25 fiction writers and 25 poets every year from an application pool of over 1,500. Teachers and counselors for the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio are thus by default not only extraordinarily accomplished writers in the early stages of their careers, but have had the opportunity to acquire extensive teaching experience while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in many cases teaching creative writing to undergraduates. It is for their teaching experience, enthusiasm, and expertise that we hire them to work at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. In short, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio offers young, passionate, high school-age creative writers the opportunity to study with some of the finest writers and teachers in the country.
Kevin Allardice
Kevin Allardice is the author of the novel Any Resemblance to Actual Persons, published by Counterpoint Press in 2013, and Family Genus Species (Outpost, May, 2017). He earned his MFA at The University of Virginia. His fiction has appeared in The Santa Monica Review, The Florida Review, The North American Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere; it has also won the Donald Barthelme Prize, twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. As of August 2023 he will be living in Iowa City.
Ren Arcamone
Ren Arcamone is a writer from Sydney, Australia. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Her work is published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast and HEAT. She lives in Iowa City, where she writes about ghosts, monsters, cyborgs, sentient plant life, distant galaxies, and queer ladies with big feelings. Currently, she’s at work on a short story collection and a novel.
Maya Arthur
Maya Arthur is a poet based in Iowa City, Iowa. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Jacket2 and Electric Literature, with forthcoming work in hearsay journal. She was a 2019 Lambda Poetry Fellow, taught by Danez Smith. Lately, her poetry explores performance, artifice and reality TV. Talk to her about Real Housewives (any city). She once was a gardener in a cemetery. She is a devoted Philadelphia Eagles fan (go Birds) and lives with her fifteen-year-old cat, Rupert, who goes by Rupie/Ruperto/Mister, depending on his mood.
Joshua Balicki
Joshua Balicki is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. He received an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He's taught for the Iowa First Nations Program, Iowa Young Writers' Studio, Austin Bat Cave, and Austin Library Foundation, and currently teaches at The University of Iowa. He’s from Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Julia Bohm
Julia Bohm is a writer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has just completed her MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work can be found in Salt Hill Journal, The Adroit Journal, and in The Offing.
Hannah Bonner
Hannah Bonner is a writer, film programmer, and educator. She is the Editor-in-Chief for Brink and the film editor for TriQuarterly. Another Woman (EastOver Press, 2024) is her first book. She received her MA in Film Studies, as well as her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa.
Ellen Boyette
Ellen Boyette received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Alberta Kelley Fellow and Teaching-Writing Fellow. Her first book of poems, BEDIEVAL, was a finalist for the Slope Editions 2019 Book Prize judged by Solmaz Sharif as well as the CSU 2021 Lighthouse Series Book Prize judged by Shane McCrae. Her work can be found at jubilat, Prelude, poets.org, The Columbia Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She is originally from Asheville, NC, where she enjoys hiking, live music, and playing with her two cats.
Scott Ditzler
Scott Ditzler is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Capote Fellow and a Teaching Writing Fellow. His fiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, December, and Puerto del Sol. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Kansas City Star. Scott currently lives and teaches in Iowa City, where he is working on a novel about working on a novel. When he isn’t busy worrying about writing, he enjoys distance running and organic gardening.
Adrian Enzastiga
Adrian Antonio Enzastiga is a playwright, poet, and Midwest princess from Omaha, Nebraska. Adrian received his BA in Creative Writing at The University of Iowa, and he is graduating from the Iowa Playwright’s Workshop this spring. He writes drag musicals, absurdist comedies, documentary plays, and reverse coming-of-age stories. Because theatre is a space of community, he prioritizes the celebration of joy in all its forms in everything he writes. He is inspired by fellow artists Tennessee Williams, Luis Valdez, and Jinkx Monsoon. His hobbies include: Pokemon Go, Dungeons & Dragons, Lego-building, and taking naps with his cat Annie. He looks forward to seeing you this summer!
Eirill Falck
Eirill Falck is a writer, translator, and editor. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she was subsequently a Zell Fellow. She was a 2020-2022 Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she completed an MFA in Literary Translation. While at the University of Iowa, she received the Stanley Award for International Research, for her work on translations of Edvard Munch’s journals. She is the recipient of the John Wagner Prize and the Hopwood Award, and has received support from The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Eirill is the co-founder of MQR: Mixtape, an imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review. She is represented by The Wylie Agency.
Scout Faller
Scout Faller is a Pushcart-nominated poet and instructor of creative writing at the University of Iowa. They have been shortlisted for the Surging Tide poetry award and nominated for Best New Poets 2026. They moved to Iowa City from San Francisco and edit Hearsay, a journal of poetry.
Gwyneth Forsythe
Gwyneth Forsythe graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with BAs in Theatre Arts and History, honors in both. In 2020, she worked as a Development Intern at Cartel Pictures (Los Angeles). In the spring of 2021, she completed her MFA in Writing for the Stage and Screen from Northwestern University, where she won the Krevoy Screenwriting Prize for her television pilot, White Dog Rises. While in Chicago, Gwyneth produced several theatre productions, worked as a freelance writer, teaching artist, and adjunct faculty for the City Colleges of Chicago. Recently, she has returned to Iowa City to work with the IYWP and to write and produce more plays.
Getty Hesse
Getty Hesse is a writer from Dallas, Texas and a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His fiction has appeared in such publications as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology. He likes bogs in theory, spiders at a distance, and cats on his lap.
Zachary Isom
Zachary Isom is a writer, wine salesman, and neerdowell from Iowa City, Iowa. He hosts a radical reading series called Reanimator with his co-conspirator Taylor Dawson. His work has been previously published in River Styx and SOLID STATE.
Gwyneth Kelly
Gwyneth Kelly is a writer from Silver Spring, Maryland. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was also a University of Iowa Writers’ Room Fellow for television writing; in 2021, she sold a comedy pilot to AMC Networks International. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University, an MA in English Literature from University College London, and has had fiction and nonfiction published in The Barcelona Review, The Washington Post, The American Scholar, and The New Republic.
Devanshi Khetarpal
Devanshi Khetarpal is an MFA Candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa from Bhopal, India, and translates from Hindi and Italian. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was a Sonny Mehta and Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction, an Associate Poetry Editor for The Bombay Literary Magazine, and the incoming co-Editor-in-Chief of Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Devanshi graduated from New York University with Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Comparative Literature and wrote her Master's thesis on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. Her work has been published in Asymptote, The Threepenny Review, Public Books, Scroll, Indiana Review, Masters Review and Poetry at Sangam, among others. She is currently working on her novel and collection of short stories, and translations of two short story collections from Hindi and a novel from Italian.
Christine Kim
Christine Kim is the world’s #1 most normal girl. She is a Korean American writer from Southern California and writes fiction, mostly.
Anna Magavern
Anna Magavern is a literary translator from the French. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she is currently a Master’s candidate in French and Francophone World Studies. She is the translator of J.J. Zana’s poetry collection Script (2024), and a former editor of Exchanges Journal of Literary Translation.
Raquel Elizabeth Martinez
Raquel Elizabeth Martinez is a Nicaraguan-American fiction writer, interested in genre-bending stories that explore the Latin American tradition of magical realism, sci-fi, and the strangeness of reality. Having grown up on a farm in Nicaragua, she especially loves to talk about her cats, her hikes deep in the woods, and the part of her that still believes there are fairies, somewhere in the brush. She is a second year MFA candidate at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Mike Meginnis
Mike Meginnis is the author of the novels Drowning Practice (2022, Ecco) and Fat Man and Little Boy (2014, Black Balloon), as well as the short story "Navigators," which appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012.
Ava Neumaier
Ava Neumaier is a speculative fiction writer from New York. She is a Writing Fellow and Teaching Assistant at the University of Iowa who has worked on the editing staff of Ink Lit Mag and earthwords. Her short stories have been published in Orlando, Fools, New Moon, Wilder Things, and others. An alumni of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, in 2024 she received an Excellence in Writing Award from the American Association of University Women, and her short story “Strange Cargo” was nominated for the American Voices Award in 2023. She will be entering her fourth year as an undergraduate at UI. Her writing merges the otherworldly with the everyday. She is currently learning American Sign Language and how to manage the campus greenhouse.
Dini Parayitam
Dini Parayitam is an Indian-American writer based in Iowa City. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2014). Her short stories have been published in Joyland Magazine, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, etc. While working on her debut novel, she wrote/produced short films “All Your Yesterdays” and “How Do You Like Your Eggs”, both were selected at Oscar-qualifying film festivals. She was also named on the inaugural The Salon x The Blacklist’s Desi List for the feature Mouna Tharangam (A Silent Wave), co-written with Jerika Marchan, to be directed by Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda. With the same team, she has also co-written the feature screenplay Mano Prapancham (The World Within). Her feature screenplays have been awarded AFS Grants, SFFILM Rainin Grant, selected for Sundance Second-Round, and competed as Top 10 finalists in AT&T Tribeca’s Untold Stories.
Goeun Park
Goeun Park (b. 1994, Busan) is a fiction writer, printer, web developer, and educator from Minnesota. They earned a BA from Pomona College, a MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and fellowships from Periplus Collective and Truman Capote. Their work can be found in The Seventh Wave. Goeun is currently working on a short story collection set in the future and a novel set in the past. They live in Iowa City with their partner and two goofy cats.
Amy Parker
Amy Parker is a writer of speculative fiction, a collector of what-if's, a comparatist who loves the way the arts intersect, borrow from one another, and sometimes all talk at once. Enduringly obsessed with a 19th century novel about whaling, a lover of medical history (especially obstetrics), and currently devouring first wave feminist essays and 1970's queer sci-fi, receiving a belated education in hip-hop, a frustrated ballerina and Bronte enthusiast, she looks forward to encountering others' writerly idiosyncrasies and obsessions wherever they arise. She is a graduate of the Clarion Sci-Fi and Fantasy Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an erstwhile Zen monk, and after ten years in the Midwest, a perplexed former Californian. Her debut collection, Beasts and Children, explores the intersecting fates of women, children, and animals through a fabulist and lyrical lens. When she’s not meditating on metafictionality or rereading chapter 94 of Moby Dick, Amy teaches writing at the University of Iowa
Jarek Pastor
Jarek Pastor is a theatremaker with a focus on play composition, dramaturgy, and directing.
Their work operates on symbolic reasoning to enact absurdist portraits of social systems from a mixed race/bilingual/transnational perspective in the spirit of the clown and duende. Their work
manifests a theatre of being more than the expected doing— of presence and acquaintance more than deed and explanation. As an instructor, Jarek seeks to nurture a feeling of playful yet focused curiosity in service to the expansion of comprehension and its invigorating effects on the individual and community. Jarek holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and a BA in Playwriting from Columbia College Chicago.
Yen Pham
Yen Pham is a writer, journalist and MFA candidate in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She attended Harvard University and Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. Her work has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, n+1, Bookforum, and ArtReview.
Anna Polonyi
Anna Polonyi is a French-American-Hungarian writer interested in how we interact with the wild parts of ourselves and the world. She was once in a carshare in France where the driver told her about a strange, unresolved mystery involving an 18th-century wolf. She became obsessed with this story for more than a decade. The outcome is her first novel, Tomorrow We'll Be Prey, forthcoming in 2027.
Rasheeda Saka
Rasheeda Saka is a Nigerian American writer, and her short stories have appeared in Joyland Magazine, Triquarterly, and Epiphany Magazine. A graduate of Princeton University, she was Literary Hub’s 2020 fall-winter editorial fellow and the assistant editor of Alta Journal’s California Book Club, for which she was awarded a 2021 Eddie & Ozzie Award for Best Newsletter. She loves biking, drinking chai lattes, and eating fried plantains (not at the same time!). Her favorite writers include Edward P. Jones, Namwali Serpell, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh.
Erin Sherry
Erin Sherry lives and writes in Iowa City. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where her courses in the Writing Certificate program explore the connections between storytelling and self and community advocacy. She is at work on a collection of stories and a novel, and her fiction can be found in the Masters Review, Always Crashing, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.
Catherine Turner
Catherine Turner is a writer from Maryland. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a fiction editor at the Iowa Review. Her journalistic writing has appeared in The Nation, Jacobin, and Bookforum. She loves indie rock music and being outdoors.
Danielle Wheeler
Danielle Wheeler was the 2010-2011 Rona Jaffe fellow in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she teaches writing and literature, manages the online course offerings for the Magid Center for Writing, and serves as the poetry editor for River Styx literary journal. She and her work can be found online at daniwheeler.com.
Harris Wheless
Harris Wheless is a writer from North Carolina and an MFA candidate in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. His work has appeared in the Oxford American, NPR, Bright Wall/Dark Room, River Styx, and elsewhere. He can be found online at harriswheless.com.
Connor White
Connor White is from Long Island, New York and is a 2017 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He graduated with a BFA in Film and Television from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and worked for several years as a film director, producer and editor before coming to Iowa City.
Wyatt Williams
Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating (UNC Press, 2021) and his essays been published by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others. Prior to his teaching career, he worked at a newspaper as a restaurant critic, in a cat furniture factory building scratching posts, and in restaurants and bars washing dishes and waiting tables. His work has been supported by awards, fellowships, and residencies from MacDowell, Hambidge Center, the James Beard Foundation, and anthologized in The Best American Food Writing.
Joel Worford
Joel Worford is a writer and musician from Richmond, Virginia. His work appears in TriQuarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Laurel Review, Chestnut Review and other places. His short story "The Word" was named a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2023, and his story "No Clubs" appears in Best Small Fictions 2024. When he's not absolutely killing it, Joel likes to take long walks by the Iowa River while listening to Jeff Buckley. Sometimes it's D'Angelo, sometimes it's Stevie Wonder. Joel also loves tennis, and chess, though he's no Beth Harmon. You can pretty much always talk to him about Game of Thrones, Toni Morrison, 2000s pop music, tennis, language as an instrument, and hot wings. He'll graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop this spring :)
Former Staff
Writers who have taught or counseled at the Iowa Young Writers' Studio since its founding in 2000 include Adeniyi Ademoroti, Adams Adeosun, Daniel Alarcón, Alexia Arthurs, Andy Axel, Micah Bateman, Katherine Bell, Amy Bernhard, Catherine Blauvelt, Shane Book, Sarah Braunstein, Marion Bright, Jamel Brinkley, Thea Brown, Suzanne Buffam, Austin Bunn, David Busis, Amy Butcher, Scott Butterfield, Christine Byrne, Greta Byrum, Abdeel Cardoso, Abigail Carney, Marjorie Celona, Daniel Cesca, Ashley Clarke, Harriet Clark, Samantha Xiao Cody, Lindsay Coleman, Arda Collins, Drive Denmon, Ben Doyle, Nick Dybek, Janelle Effiwatt, Jason England, Michelle Falkoff, Dana Fang, Joe Fassler, Sarah Fay, Adam Fell, Indya Finch, Zkara Gaillard, David Gorin, Jane Gregory, Jorge Guerra, Jill Haberkern, Ben Hale, Meg Hartmann, Amy Hassinger, Mary Hickman-Fernandez, Logan Hoffman-Smith, Nate Hoks, Jane Huffman, Aaron Hwang, Naomi Jackson, Gilad Jaffe, Evan James, Micah Ariel James, Leslie Jamison, Rebecca Johns, Nimo Johnson, Riley Johnson, Amanda Kallis, Daniel Khalastchi, Sally Keith, Kristin Kelly, Justin Kramon, Josh Kryah, Kerrie Kvashay-Boyle, Juliana Lamy, Nam Le, Anna Lewis, Jason Lewis, Jane Lewty, Jack Livings, Claire Lombardo, James Longley, Sara Luzuriaga, Carmen Maria Machado, Samantha Macpherson, Alex Madison, Dora Malech, Steve Marlowe, Anthony Marra, Peyton Marshall, Benjamin Mason, Aaron McCollough, Madeline McDonnell, Sara McGuirk, Elyse Mele, Nancy Mendoza, Mathilde Merouani, Nora Claire Miller, Andrew Milward, Fatima Mirza, Kevin Moffett, Melissa Mogollon, Paula Morris, Anna Morrison, Nina Morrison, Becca Myers, Andrew Nance, Carl Napolitano, Regina Napolitano, Thisbe Nissen, Derek Nnuro, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Karen Parkman, Emily Pettit, Hannah Piette, Daniel Poppick, Nitya Rayapati, Margaret Reges, Lewis Robinson, Valentina Rios Romero, Dan Rosenberg, Margaret Ross, Alex Ruskell, Anjali Sachdeva, Sanjena Sathian, Christian Schlegel, Lauren Shapiro, Vivian Shotwell, Nina Siegal, Lucy Silag, Delilah Silberman, Jenee Skinner, Will Smiley, Jared Stanley, Kate Sullivan, Michelle Taransky, Tim Taranto, Catherine Theis, Vu Tran, Ryan Tucker, Justin Tussing, Christine Utz, Kelsi Vanada, Anya Ventura, Cara Wall, Keenan Walsh, Patricia Walsh, Glen Waters, Malena Watrous, Elizabeth Weiss, Lisa Wells, Monica West, Julia Whicker, Vinnie Wilhelm, Antoine Wilson, De'Shawn Winslow, Jeffrey Xiong, Rachel Yoder, Ada Zhang, C. Pam Zhang and Jenny Zhang.