IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series

Name: IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series
Start: 2025-10-12T15:30:00-05:00
Location: 15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240

Schedule

Sun, 12 Oct, 2025 at 03:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240 | Iowa City, IA

Please join us for our annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Rajaa Alsanea (Saudi Arabia), Yu Yuen Lan (Hong Kong), and Kazim Ali (United States).
Rajaa Alsanea الصانع رجاء (novelist, endodontist; Saudi Arabia) is known for her debut novel Girls of Riyadh, recently dramatized by BBC Radio. Translated into 30+ languages and a bestseller in Europe and the Middle East, it was nominated for the 2009 International Dublin Literary Award. Widely studied in academia, it has inspired extensive scholarly research. Alsanea was named Cultural Figure of the Year (Al Arabiya, 2008) and one of Forbes ME’s 40 Most Influential Arabs Under 40 (2017). She is currently a full-time clinician, Clinical Professor and Head of Endodontics in Riyadh. Her participation is made possible by an anonymous gift to the IWP.
Yu Yuen Lan (fiction writer, poet, nonfiction writer; Hong Kong) is the author of the novel 我是嬰 [Before I] (2023), poetry collection 島之肉 [Nowhere Land] (2022) and short stories collection 無一不野獸 [The Bestiary] (2018). In recent years, she also served as a judge for the Hong Kong Youth Literary Awards in the fiction category. Her work The Bestiary was nominated for the Renaissance Award 2019 for the literature category. Before I is her recent novel, attempting to break through her personal writing patterns and challenge existing local novel conventions in both form and content. She is currently a freelance journalist, writing feature articles and interviews for cultural magazines and online media. Her participation is made possible by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.
Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim's six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali's passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken.