The Free Generative Writing Workshop is Iowa City's only monthly writing workshop that brings together adult writers of all levels to have their imaginations sparked by our area's most talented writers and teachers, at absolutely no cost. The goal is to create a supportive environment where participants can generate new writing and meet others interested in the same. Each month a different talented writer-teacher from our area will invite us to write from an original prompt—and then compose along beside us as we explore where that prompt leads. After writing, we'll have the option to share what we've created and receive feedback.

The Workshop is presented by PromptPress & Iowa City Poetry

This month's leader: Kerry Howley

Kerry Howley is the author of Thrown, a New York Times Notable Book, New York Times Editor’s Choice, and pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues. Writing in Salon, critic Lydia Kiesling called Thrown “extraordinary,” “incredibly bracing,” and reminiscent of “some of the boldest voices of twentieth-century fiction.” Novelist Lev Grossman called it “probably the most bizarre and fascinating book I’ve read this year” in the pages of Time, adding: “The precision of Howley’s prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace…. She writes like somebody in ecstasy.” Thrown has been translated into four languages and optioned by the actress Rebecca Hall.

Howley is a frequent contributor to New York Magazine. Her fiction and essays have also appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Bookforum. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and currently at work on a nonfiction thriller about the American surveillance state, forthcoming from Knopf.