Writers' Workshop

Join us monthly to generate new creative writing inspired by works in the Stanley collection. Each session will be led by a different talented writer from our area, who will be offering a new prompt and a new approach to ekphrastic writing (writing inspired by visual art). Bring your own notebook and pencil or computer and leave with the beginning of a newly written piece.

Co-sponsored by Iowa City Poetry. Teen and adult writers in all genres are welcome.

Write at the Stanley meets every fourth...

Benjamin Hale will read from his new book, Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa Associate Professor, Bennett Sims. Praised by Patton Oswalt as "The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read," Cave Mountain tells the true story of how Hale's cousin, Haley, disappeared in a mountain trail in the Ozarks when she was only 6 years old in 2001. After Haley was found, she spoke of...

In addition to his latest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He has...