University of Iowa-associated writers continue to amass honors, recognition

IOWA CITY — The University of Iowa for years has had the top writing program in the country among public campuses — competing at times for No. 1 nationally with Ivy League universities like Yale and Brown, and generating a stream of award-winning novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists and screenwriters.

Boasting 40-plus Pulitzer Prize winners — including one this year — eight U.S. poet laureates, more than 20 MacArthur Genius Grant recipients and dozens of other honorees including Oscar and Tony winners for on-screen and on-Broadway writing, the UI is continuing to accumulate honors.

Earlier this fall, five writers with UI ties — three graduates and two faculty — joined an elite crop of authors longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award, upping the tally of UI-associated winners and finalists for that honor to more than 80 over the years, including the likes of Flannery O'Connor, John Irving and Marilynne Robinson.

“It's immensely gratifying to know that anyone cares about what I'm up to,” said UI associate professor and director of the English and creative writing major Kaveh Akbar, who placed as a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. “It’s a privilege to be the beneficiary of anybody's attention.”

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Akbar — an Iranian-American poet who took a circuitous route to the UI three years ago through Purdue, Butler and Florida State universities — was nominated for his novel “Martyr!” which follows a young man, recently orphaned and sober, on his self-prescribed journey to become a martyr.

“He may martyr himself, but he has to find a cause worthy of his martyrdom, and that is the propulsion of the book,” Akbar told The Gazette.

UI professor Elizabeth Willis, on the faculty in the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was longlisted in poetry for her prose, “Liontaming in America” — a hybrid work engaged in “American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism and film.”

Like Akbar — who’s published past includes collections of poems, like “Pilgrim Bell” in 2021 — Willis has written six books of poetry, including her Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Alive: New and Selected Poems.”

Joining Akbar as a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award — but in the non-fiction category — was Deborah Jackson Taffa, who got a master’s of fine arts from the UI Nonfiction Writing Program in 2013. Her memoir “Whiskey Tender” follows her journey as a mixed-tribe native girl to an independent interpretation of her identity, despite social and familial pressures.

Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum m.s. RedCherries emerged as a finalist for poetry with a collection called, “mother,” rooted in the story of an Indigenous child adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family.

The collection “is at once a story, a memory, and a dream,” a National Book Award judge wrote. “Riddled with shadowed humor that would bait the consciousness, these poems tenderly, vulnerably, and fearlessly sequence threads of familial bonds, heredity, and Indigenous identity.”

And Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Tony Tulathimutte was longlisted this year for his novel “Rejection” — diving into the “touchiest problems of modern life.”

“’Rejection’ is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself,” according to his publisher.

Earlier this year, Jayne Anne Phillips — who earned an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel, “Night Watch,” about a mom and daughter “seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.”

Although germs of Akbar’s finalist “Martyr!” began for him as a child, the UI professor said he pursued the book with a singular focus after the pandemic struck in 2020.

“It really became the earnest work of my days over quarantine,” he said.

As for what’s next, Akbar said, he’s just writing.

“I just write, and I sort of figure out what it is later,” he said. “I'm just throwing a lot of stuff at the wall right now and seeing what comes out.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com