The Writing University - The University of Iowa
ONE-ELEVEN CHURCH STREET

Meet the Fellows

The Writing Fellows are all recent graduates of the University of Iowa's MFA programs in Writing and Translation.



Andre Perry

ANDRE PERRY is a writer and musician. His essays have won several awards and have been nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes. He has toured the country with nationally acclaimed acts. He is currently mixing a new record and finishing a book.


Kevin Holden

KEVIN HOLDEN is from New England. He attended Harvard (AB), Cambridge (MPhil), where he was the John Eliot Scholar, and Iowa (MFA), where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. In addition to writing poetry, he works on the philosophy of literature, especially, most recently, in Hegel and Celan. He translates poetry from Russian and French, and is teaching courses on poetry and film and poetry and philosophy. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Alpine and Identity, and his work has appeared in such journals as Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Harvard Advocate, The Liberal, Parcel, and Typo. He hopes soon to finish his blueprints for a combination letter and cider press.


Benjamin Hale

BENJAMIN HALE grew up in Colorado, and studied literature and Ancient Greek at Sarah Lawrence College. He has worked as a night shift baker, a trompe l’oeil painter, and a technical documents editor. In 2008 he received an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is intensely interested in animal cognition and the philosophy of language. He is hard at work on a novel narrated by a chimpanzee.


Diana Thow

DIANA THOW was raised in Albany, California and is not too fond of winter. She moved to New York City to attend Barnard College, and graduated in 2003 with a degree in English and Creative Writing. Since then she has worked at a literary agency, waited tables, and traveled as often as she could manage. She began translating Italian poetry while studying in Rome her junior year abroad, and moved to Iowa to pursue an MFA in literary translation in 2006 as an Iowa Arts Fellow. She finished her MFA this summer with a thesis on the poet Amelia Rosselli and currently teaches courses in literary translation at Iowa as a Writing Fellow. She is the book review editor at Words Without Borders: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/, and has published her translations in eXchanges, Carte Italiane, Mare Nostrum, 91st Meridian, and elsewhere.