Soon, high-school students from Iowa might be able to trade places with those in Japan. Kim Heidemann, the executive director of Iowa Sister States, is in Yamanashi, Japan, to discuss the possibility of a high-school student exchange program beginning in the spring of 2016. Iowa Sister States is a nonprofit organization that promotes programs between Iowa and various “sister states” to foster positive international relationships. These sister states include Yamanashi, Kosovo, and Hebei, China, among many others, and programs range from economic trade to education. “These relationships help give students and professors new opportunities to meet people from another culture and exchange ideas,” said Kassi Wheeler, the international-program manager for Iowa Sister States.

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.