Iowa City has been selected to host the 2018 annual meeting of UNESCO Cities of Literature.

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.

Naomi Jackson knows better than anyone that Iowa City and Barbados don’t have a lot in common. Born to West Indian parents and graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Jackson has spent a great deal of time in both locations. Despite a disparity in similarity, the confluence of the two led to Jackson’s Barbados-based debut novel, “The Star Side of Bird Hill.” You can hear Naomi read from her novel at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City on July 20.

Clare Jones, of New Orleans, LA, has received a 2015-16 Fulbright U.S. Student Grant in Creative Writing to New Zealand and Polynesia where she will research and write a book of poetry titled “Neotype” that weaves together themes of botany, ornithology, and geology of the area.

Beatrice Smigasiewicz has received a 2015-16 Fulbright U.S. Student Award to write a book of essays titled Recovered Futures, which will investigate the representation of post-Soviet Polish identity in the cultural capital of Krakow. Smigasiewicz graduated with an M.F.A. in literary translation from the University of Iowa in May 2014 and will earn a second M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the UI this May. As a Polish-American who lived in the country until the age of eleven, Beatrice seeks to understand modern-day Poland through interviews, museum research, and study of Polish literature and architecture.