Advisory council 2021-2022
Yassie Buchanan
she/her
Yassie Buchanan is a senior studying English and Creative Writing with a minor in Spanish at the University of Iowa. She is passionate about creating and uplifting work that highlights minority voices and experiences. Yassie writes a variety of pieces including non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. She has worked as a columnist at the Daily Iowan, mostly writing about social justice. She was awarded first place in column by the Associated Collegiate Press awards. Yassie also serves as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Director at the University of Iowa Dance Marathon.
David Duer
he/him
David Duer recently retired from teaching English language arts at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. He served for many years as the Washington Literary Press faculty advisor. In the late seventies he was the editor of the literary magazine Luna Tack, and in the early eighties performed his poetry with local new wave bands The Monos'lab Orchestra and Pink Gravy. Duer worked as an editorial associate and assistant printer at The Toothpaste Press and Coffee House Press until its move from West Branch, Iowa, to Minneapolis. His work has appeared in Ascent, Exquisite Corpse, English Journal, Little Village, North American Review, and Poetry, among others. A chapbook of his poetry, To Bread (o.p.), has been published by Coffee House Press.
Laura Felleman
she/her
Laura Felleman started writing poetry in 2016, and credits the Free Generative Writing Workshops in Iowa City with her growth as a poet. She hosts the monthly Writers Open Mic at the local library (or via Zoom during pandemics). Her proudest poetic moment was seeing her poem on a city bus as part of the Iowa City Poetry in Public program. Poetry has given her a way to gesture towards ineffable experiences and emotions, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve on the Advisory Council in order to make the wonder of poetry accessible to all levels of writers and readers.
Jane Huffman
She/Her
Jane Huffman grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. In 2019 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is editor-in-chief of Guesthouse and teaches at the University of Iowa.
Cory Hutchinson-Reuss
She/Her
Originally from Arkansas, Cory Hutchinson-Reuss received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa, and now lives and writes in Iowa City. Her recent work has appeared in basalt, The Offing, Superstition Review, wildness, Pangyrus, and The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week feature. She has been a Best New Poets nominee and the recipient of the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize for Poetry from Crazyhorse. She volunteers in the Writers Workshop at Oakdale Prison and serves as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. On the horizon: a chapbook of poems in conversation with the visual work of book and paper artist Giselle Simón, forthcoming as part of the PromptPress Gallery Series.
Becca Klaver
she/her
Becca Klaver is the author of three books of poetry—LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020)—as well as several chapbooks. Her poems, which explore place, gender, American culture, and virtual and physical realities, have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Gramma Weekly, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and on Verse Daily and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series.
Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, Becca attended the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD). Her dissertation, “Include Everything: Contemporary American Poetry and the Feminist Everyday,” investigates how women poets across post-1945 U.S. avant-garde movements—Diane di Prima, Sonia Sanchez, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley—invented new forms and processes that responded to the gendered conditions of everyday life.
Margaret LeMay
She/Her
Margaret LeMay has taught creative writing in diverse settings for over 15 years, many of which were at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Better, The Cortland Review, Little Village, Transom, and elsewhere. Her poem “The Heart Wakes Into” served as title and six movement titles for a piano quintet commissioned by and performed at the Library of Congress. Her work has been shortlisted for the Discovery/the Boston Review Poetry Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize. Margaret attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Barnard College, and she lives in Iowa City.
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
she/her
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she likes to rock climb. She is the author of four full length poetry collections and twelve chapbooks. Her chapbook “Teeth Have a Hardness Scale of 5,” is forthcoming this summer from Sputnik and Fizzle Press and her chapbook “The Female Citizens of Sunshine Nation Face off with Light Sucking Demons” recently came out from Grey Book Press. Her work can be seen at or is forthcoming from The Pinch, Cleaver, Yalobusha Review, Zone 3, and Grist. She is excited to host the reading series Today You Are Perfect sponsored by the non-profit Iowa City Poetry. Find her online at her website.
Nora Claire Miller
they/them
Nora Claire Miller is a poet from New York City. Nora’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in TYPO, Tagvverk, Hobart, The Brooklyn Review, APARTMENT, Pulpmouth, and other places. Nora's chapbook, LULL (2020) was the winner of the 2019 Ghost Proposal Chapbook contest. Nora earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Tracie Morris
she/her
Tracie Morris is writer/editor of 7 books and is a poet, professor, performer, voice teacher and theorist. She holds an MFA in poetry from CUNY Hunter College, a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, and studied British Acting technique at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her most recent poetry collection is Hard Kore/Per-form: Poems of Mythos and Place, Joca Seria, 2017 (English with French translation). Tracie became an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist in 2018; that year she also served as the 2018-2019 Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. Tracie was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at The Iowa Writers Workshop for three semesters before joining the permanent faculty as their first African-American Professor of Poetry in Fall, 2020.
Linda Muller
She/Her
Making Iowa City home since 2010, Linda Muller works full-time at the University of Iowa and spends the rest of her time pursuing happiness in the form of poetry, travel, walking the dog, and learning where to find the best crème brûlée (it’s an ongoing quest), among other activities. Her poetry can be found in Lyrical Iowa, Voices, Writers of the Depths Anthology, Riza Press’ Project Healthy Love, and at typishly.com. She has also been heard competing in the Des Moines Poetry Slam, which led to her starting Iowa City Poetry Slam in 2018.
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri
She/Her
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from Iowa. After receiving her MFA from the University of New Hampshire, she oversaw the International Writing Program’s Fall Residency at the University of Iowa where she created, edited, and produced Origins: The International Writing Program Podcast (2017 & 2018 Seasons). In 2018, she was a Jentel Artist Residency Fellow, a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College, and a volunteer instructor in the University of Iowa’s Liberal Arts Beyond Bars program. She is at work on her first full-length collection of poetry with the working title of PSALMS FOR OUR BODY and has poems forthcoming from CALYX, Bennington Review, and jubilat. She also translates Norwegian poetry and is a candidate in the University of Iowa's Literary Translation Workshop. She is a scholarship recipient for the 2021 Sewanee Writers' Conference. During the year of the Hayman Fire, she was a Rocky Mountain National Park wildland firefighter.
Caleb Rainey
he/him
Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey is an Iowa City based spoken word poet who has performed in multiple cities across the US, including Chicago and New York City. He is a winner of the Des Moines Poetry Slam, the Iowa City Poetry Slam, and finalist for the UNESCO City of Literature Global Slam - Iowa City. Caleb is the author of two books, Look, Black Boy and Heart Notes, along with publications in Best Emerging Writers in Iowa 2019, the Little Village, and Black Art; Real Stories. He is also the founder and director of IC Speaks, an organization that teaches spoken word to local high school students.
Advisory council 2020-21
David Duer
he/him
David Duer recently retired from teaching English language arts at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. He served for many years as the Washington Literary Press faculty advisor. In the late seventies he was the editor of the literary magazine Luna Tack, and in the early eighties performed his poetry with local new wave bands The Monos'lab Orchestra and Pink Gravy. Duer worked as an editorial associate and assistant printer at The Toothpaste Press and Coffee House Press until its move from West Branch, Iowa, to Minneapolis. His work has appeared in Ascent, Exquisite Corpse, English Journal, Little Village, North American Review, and Poetry, among others. A chapbook of his poetry, To Bread (o.p.), has been published by Coffee House Press.
Anaïs Duplan
he/him
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and will teach at Sarah Lawrence College and St. Joseph’s College.
His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021.
As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.
photo credit: Walid Mohanna
Laura Felleman
she/her
Laura Felleman started writing poetry in 2016, and credits the Free Generative Writing Workshops in Iowa City with her growth as a poet. She hosts the monthly Writers Open Mic at the local library (or via Zoom during pandemics). Her proudest poetic moment was seeing her poem on a city bus as part of the Iowa City Poetry in Public program. Poetry has given her a way to gesture towards ineffable experiences and emotions, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve on the Advisory Council in order to make the wonder of poetry accessible to all levels of writers and readers.
Jane Huffman
She/Her
Jane Huffman grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. In 2019 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is editor-in-chief of Guesthouse and teaches at the University of Iowa.
Cory Hutchinson-Reuss
She/Her
Originally from Arkansas, Cory Hutchinson-Reuss received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa, and now lives and writes in Iowa City. Her recent work has appeared in basalt, The Offing, Superstition Review, wildness, Pangyrus, and The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week feature. She has been a Best New Poets nominee and the recipient of the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize for Poetry from Crazyhorse. She volunteers in the Writers Workshop at Oakdale Prison and serves as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. On the horizon: a chapbook of poems in conversation with the visual work of book and paper artist Giselle Simón, forthcoming as part of the PromptPress Gallery Series.
Becca Klaver
she/her
Becca Klaver is the author of three books of poetry—LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020)—as well as several chapbooks. Her poems, which explore place, gender, American culture, and virtual and physical realities, have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Gramma Weekly, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and on Verse Daily and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series.
Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, Becca attended the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD). Her dissertation, “Include Everything: Contemporary American Poetry and the Feminist Everyday,” investigates how women poets across post-1945 U.S. avant-garde movements—Diane di Prima, Sonia Sanchez, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley—invented new forms and processes that responded to the gendered conditions of everyday life.
Margaret LeMay
She/Her
Margaret LeMay has taught creative writing in diverse settings for over 15 years, many of which were at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Better, The Cortland Review, Little Village, Transom, and elsewhere. Her poem “The Heart Wakes Into” served as title and six movement titles for a piano quintet commissioned by and performed at the Library of Congress. Her work has been shortlisted for the Discovery/the Boston Review Poetry Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize. Margaret attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Barnard College, and she lives in Iowa City.
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
she/her
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she likes to rock climb. She is the author of four full length poetry collections and twelve chapbooks. Her chapbook “Teeth Have a Hardness Scale of 5,” is forthcoming this summer from Sputnik and Fizzle Press and her chapbook “The Female Citizens of Sunshine Nation Face off with Light Sucking Demons” recently came out from Grey Book Press. Her work can be seen at or is forthcoming from The Pinch, Cleaver, Yalobusha Review, Zone 3, and Grist. She is excited to host the reading series Today You Are Perfect sponsored by the non-profit Iowa City Poetry. Find her online at her website.
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri
She/Her
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from Iowa. After receiving her MFA from the University of New Hampshire, she oversaw the International Writing Program’s Fall Residency at the University of Iowa where she created, edited, and produced Origins: The International Writing Program Podcast (2017 & 2018 Seasons). In 2018, she was a Jentel Artist Residency Fellow, a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College, and a volunteer instructor in the University of Iowa’s Liberal Arts Beyond Bars program. She is at work on her first full-length collection of poetry with the working title of PSALMS FOR OUR BODY and has poems forthcoming from CALYX, Bennington Review, and jubilat. She also translates Norwegian poetry and is a candidate in the University of Iowa's Literary Translation Workshop. She is a scholarship recipient for the 2021 Sewanee Writers' Conference. During the year of the Hayman Fire, she was a Rocky Mountain National Park wildland firefighter.
Nora Claire Miller
they/them
Nora Claire Miller is a poet from New York City. Nora’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in TYPO, Tagvverk, Hobart, The Brooklyn Review, APARTMENT, Pulpmouth, and other places. Nora's chapbook, LULL (2020) was the winner of the 2019 Ghost Proposal Chapbook contest. Nora earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Linda Muller
She/Her
Making Iowa City home since 2010, Linda Muller works full-time at the University of Iowa and spends the rest of her time pursuing happiness in the form of poetry, travel, walking the dog, and learning where to find the best crème brûlée (it’s an ongoing quest), among other activities. Her poetry can be found in Lyrical Iowa, Voices, Writers of the Depths Anthology, Riza Press’ Project Healthy Love, and at typishly.com. She has also been heard competing in the Des Moines Poetry Slam, which led to her starting Iowa City Poetry Slam in 2018.
Caleb Rainey
he/him
Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey is an Iowa City based spoken word poet who has performed in multiple cities across the US, including Chicago and New York City. He is a winner of the Des Moines Poetry Slam, the Iowa City Poetry Slam, and finalist for the UNESCO City of Literature Global Slam - Iowa City. Caleb is the author of two books, Look, Black Boy and Heart Notes, along with publications in Best Emerging Writers in Iowa 2019, the Little Village, and Black Art; Real Stories. He is also the founder and director of IC Speaks, an organization that teaches spoken word to local high school students.
Steven Willis
he/him
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, 27 year old Steven Willis uses his writing background to creatively articulate the intricacies of African American culture. With art heavily influenced by urban life and religion, Steven mixes elements of hip hop and performance with formal teachings of History and anthropology to help express his eclectic personal narrative. Willis began doing spoken word at the age of 15 as a participant of Louder Than A Bomb and has performed for the likes of Charlamagne tha God and Olympic Track Gold Medalist Sonya Richards Ross. Wills is a contributing writer to the BreakBeat Poets Anthology, NYU’s National Council for Teacher of English Journal, Manhattanville College’s Graffiti Magazine and is a 3 time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist. He is currently an MFA Acting Candidate at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.