You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, and others. She has been nominated for Pushcart, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the CLMP Firecracker Awards. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, Second Place Winner of Kelsay Books' 2022 Women’s Poetry Contest, and the 2022 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award. A reader for Peauxdunque Review and editor for Bear Review, Nikki is the co-founder of lmnl lit, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has a poetry chapbook, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and a hybrid chapbook, Bayou Sonata (forthcoming, NOLA DNA, 2023). You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Laura Johnson holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and is a graduate (BA, MA) of the University of Iowa. Laura’s poetry and prose has appeared in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Prompt Press, and Wild Roof Journal, among others. She is a 2019 Best of Net Nominee. Laura’s chapbook, Memento Vivere (Cabin Bear Books), is available at laurajohnsonwriter.com and wherever you buy books. A second poetry collection and a collection of short stories are forthcoming in 2024. 

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Sarah Minor is an essayist and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Prize in Prose, Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020), winner of the Big Other Nonfiction Book Award, and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016). She’s the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and an Individual Research Grant to Iceland from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Her essays have been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, Advanced Creative Nonfiction, and A Harp in the Stars. She currently teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at TriQuarterly Review.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, multi-genre writer, teacher, and public scholar. A 2022-23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author of Swoon (2022), whose title poem is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In addition to a co-authored chapbook Studies in Brotherly Love (PromptPress, 2021) and a poetic series A Doorknob for the Eye (2017), his poems have been published by Poetry Foundation, Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, A Hole in the Wall, The Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Bellingham Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, Prospect, wordgatherings, and The Art of Autism. His lyric essay “Passive Plants”, published in the Iowa Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018). He teaches inclusive, multigenerational, global poetry writing classes through Listen2Us and poetry writing courses for alternatively communicating autistics through the LYNX Project in Chicago. A public scholar, he teaches and presents nationally on a range of topics, including the NEH-sponsored talk on “Disrupting Ableism Through Artful Activism.” More recent scholarship includes an article in Logic Magazine titled “Disrupting the Garden Wall”; a co-authored essay titled “Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability” in Er(r)go; and a chapter “Unearthing the Concepts That Bury Us,” forthcoming in a scholarly anthology, Disability in Dialogue. He is also the co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017). Before moving to Iowa City, DJ graduated with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in 2017.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Sarah Rizzuto holds a Masters in English as well as a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University. She has also taught Disability Studies, a course she developed through Women and Gender Studies at SCSU. Sarah is the former president of the CT Poetry Society’s New Haven chapter. She’s been published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature as well as Kaleidoscope magazine. Sarah hopes to publish her first chapbook soon, which honors her father’s life. Along with being a poet, she considers herself an advocate for social justice.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Nicole VanderLinden’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Epiphany, Shenandoah, and elsewhere, and in 2020, Lauren Groff selected her story as the winner of the New Ohio Review Fiction Prize. She serves as the fiction/nonfiction book review editor for Colorado Review, is a reader for Ploughshares, and has been a Tennessee Williams fiction scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Iowa City and is finishing her first novel.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Lisa K. Roberts has taught literature and writing at universities in Hong Kong, Virginia, Las Vegas, and Nebraska. After moving to Iowa, she worked as Assistant Director of the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Today she is the director of Iowa City Poetry, a community arts organization sharing literary resources with writers of all ages, incomes, and identities. Her poems have appeared in Plainsongs, The Untidy Season, and Little Village. She has performed spoken word poems at a variety of shows, including Was the Word, Voicebox, The Hook, and Poetry in Motion.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Darius Stewart is recently the author of a book-length collection of poems, Intimacies in Borrowed Light, from EastOver Press, as well as the chapbooks The Ghost the Night Becomes, 2013 winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, and two titles selected for Main Street Rag's Editor's Choice Chapbook Series: Sotto Voce (2008) and The Terribly Beautiful (2006). His lyric memoir, Be Not Afraid of My Body, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing in fall 2023. Darius's poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Salamander, Verse Daily, and others. He received an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. In 2021, the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame honored him with their inaugural Emerging Writer Award. He is currently a Lulu Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa.

You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online. To join virtually, please register HERE. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington St, Iowa City. Everyone’s welcome!

Katie Runde grew up on the Jersey Shore, where her family ran boardwalk businesses. Her debut novel, The Shore, was published in May 2022 by Scribner and was an Indie Next pick, as well as a New York Times editors' choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover pick, and an Amazon editors' pick. The Shore was named a best new book by Entertainment Weekly, Shondaland, Glamour, and The Millions. She also has recent work published in LitHub and Catapult, and she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters.