Iowa State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment welcomes four recent alumni of the MFA program back to Iowa to celebrate their recently published books.
Author: lskramer
HOME VOICES FESTIVAL DETAILS
Friday, February 3rd | 1 – 5 PM
1:00 – 4:00 PM | Ames Public Library | 515 Douglas Avenue
Literary readings & panel discussion with invited authors
4:00: 5:00 PM: Dog-Eared Books | 203 Main Street
Book signing & catered reception
The 2023 Home Voices Festival brings together alumni of the Creative Writing and Environment program at Iowa State University. Invited alumni this year are Ana Hurtado (Ecuador), Cathleen Bascom (Kansas), Chris Wiewiora (Florida), and Tegan Swanson (Wisconsin).
The Festival celebrates the recent book publications of invited alumni and is the kick-off event of the spring 2023 Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series at Iowa State, which features additional nationally and internationally known authors who will be visiting the ISU campus for public lectures during the Spring 2023 semester.
For a full lineup of Spring 2023 events: Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series
H O M E V O I C E S A U T H O R S
ANA HURTADO is a speculative fiction writer and a Clarion West 2022 alum. She is a graduate of Iowa State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing & Environment, and her work has been published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. LeVar Burton read one of her stories for his podcast LeVar Burton Reads. She is a professor of creative writing at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. You can find her via her website www.anahurtadowrites.com or on Twitter at @ponciovicario.
CATHLEEN BASCOM is the 10th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, the first woman to serve as bishop of the diocese. Bascom grew up in Denver, and she earned a BA in English from the University of Kansas in 1984 and an MA in Modern Literature from Exeter University (UK) in 1991. She earned her M.Div. at Seabury-Western in 1990 and a Doctor of Ministry in Preaching from Iliff School of Theology in Denver in 2005. In 2017 she completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. In 2018 she was named to a three-year term on the Episcopal Church’s Task Force on Care of Creation and Environmental Racism. She also is the author of a novel, Of Green Stuff Woven, published by Light Messages Publishing. She is married to the writer Tim Bascom, and they have two adult sons, Conrad and Luke. https://episcopal-ks.org/about-the-bishop/
CHRIS WIEWIORA earned his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University in 2014. While at ISU, he served as the managing editor of the literary magazine Flyway, and after graduating, the National Endowment for Humanities deemed him a Humanities Scholar for his KHOI 89.1FM radio show “Book Central,” where he interviewed authors writing from the Central Time Zone. A portion of his nonfiction MFA thesis about growing up in and going back to Warsaw, Poland, was published as the chapbook The Distance Is More Than an Ocean by Finishing Line Press. His writing about relationships has been published on The Hairpin, The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus, and many other online magazines that begin with “the.” He has contributed to The Good Men Project for more than a decade, including his column “Divorce in the Time of Corona.” His writing has been widely anthologized in Best American Sports Writing, Best Food Writing, The Norton Reader, Back to the Lake, The Best of Wanderlust, and many others. The Chris Wiewiora Papers, including drafts and manuscripts, are held at Iowa State University’s Special Collections and University Archives in the Parks Library.
Originally from Minnesota, TEGAN SWANSON has made home at Nottingham Co-operative in Madison, Wisconsin; at the Lalo Loor Dry Forest Reserve along the Pacific coast of Ecuador; in the historic Orange Gentleman of Ames, Iowa; along the banks of the Rhône river in Lyon, France; and in a solar-powered hut on Namdrik Atoll of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As an advocate–artist, she has offered undergraduate composition and creative writing classes, taught ESL and environmental science with tiny humans and adults, facilitated therapeutic creative workshops for the National Alliance for Mental Illness of Central Iowa, worked with young folks in Madison’s public high schools and at Ames’ Rosedale Shelter, and served as a legal advocate for survivors of violence in Dane County, Wisconsin. Currently, she is the Systems Change Coordinator for End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, where she advocates for survivor-centered policy change & transformative justice, and serves on the MMIW/R Task Force. She loves Lake Superior and the North Coast, volunteer dill and flowering perennials, fresh fish and wild blueberries, hiking near & snorkeling in large bodies of salt water, horse therapy, collecting artifacts for her ever-expanding wunderkammer, cooking for loved ones, and paradigms, tangents, and queer, healing-centered emergent strategy. Things We Found When the Water Went Down is her debut novel from Catapult Co. She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University, where she was a Pearl Hogrefe fellow. https://teganniaswanson.org/
SPONSORS
Humanities Iowa | ISU Committee on Lectures | Department of English | MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment | Pearl Hogrefe Fund.