Amanda Kloser was born and raised in Dubuque, and she had no plans of leaving. It was not until a year and a half ago that the idea of moving away from her friends and family to a foreign country crossed her mind.

Amanda Kloser, a UI graduate with a M.A.T. in Secondary Education: English, is the winner of a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grant to Turkey for 2016-17.

Delaney Nolan, an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, traveled to Istanbul on a Stanley Award. She researched topics such as gender, sexuality, and feminism within modern and historical Turkish society, which enabled her to write two short stories. She reflects on her research and the lively city of Istanbul in the following story.

Audrey Williams, of West Des Moines, IA, has received a 2015-16 Fulbright U.S. Student Award to analyze Turkish development cooperation with Somalia, Kenya and Sudan. Audrey is a 2013 graduate of the University of Iowa with a B.A. in political science and French. She is currently working as a Program Associate for Partnership for a Secure America in Washington D.C.

For the past seven summers, the University of Iowa's Between the Lines programs has been bringing high school-age writers from Russia and Arabic-speaking nations to Iowa City for a two-week, summertime residency.This year's program — which is hosted by the International Writing Program — will be offering a special summer session that will include about two dozen 17-to-20-year-old writers from two nations that have had been at odds for for generations: Turkey and Armenia. The international writers will be joined by a smaller cohort of similarly aged writers from the U.S.