The IWP is among the best known institutions at the University of Iowa and the premier institution of its kind in the world. In its nearly 40-year history, the program has welcomed over 1000 writers from over 100 countries. In 2003 the UI's School of Library and Information Science took a first step towards preserving and cataloging IWP's large archives so as to make them available to scholars and the public.

The first phase of this project has consisted of digitizing and annotating the audiovisual materials most threatened by disintegration. In the coming phases the archivists will catalogue the program's full holdings and make accessible on-line all of the IWP's recorded sounds and images from the late 1960s on. Eventually the same will be accomplished for the paper collection.

Click above to enter the IWP Digital Archives. You will be able to search the recordings that have been digitized and read the detailed catalog entries annotating their content.

Agreement for inclusion of work in IWP archives

Like a linguistic tourniquet, the omnipresent cinch of English is making it increasingly difficult for us, immersed in it, to hear what others are saying about us abroad when they speak among themselves, in words of their own.

The International Writing Program at the University of Iowa is currently designing a course which would give English-speaking students a glimpse of how "America" is being spoken about, alluded to, figured, in contemporary world fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. We would like to assemble and continuously expand a collection of recent pieces or literary fragments (whether already translated or forwarded to us in the original to be translated, if possible, by students in the MFA program in translation here at UI), then used as course readings and hopefully published annually as a special issue of the IWP's on-line journal 91st Meridian.

For suggestions, inquiries, and submissions, please contact the IWP editor

natasa-durovicova@uiowa.edu.