Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa sponsored or co-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact the Stanley in advance at 319-335-1727.

Write at the Stanley

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 and the Stanley Museum of Art.

Adult and teen writers in all genres are welcome. No registration necessary. Meet us in the museum lobby at 2:30 pm on the appointed date.

DATES for 2026:

Sunday, January 25, 2026 — Caelainn Barr
Sunday, February 22, 2026 — Lexi Rosa
Sunday, March 22, 2026 — Becca Klaver
Sunday, April 26, 2026 — Warren C. Longmire
Sunday, May 24, 2026 — Adam Witte

TIME: 2:30-4:15 pm

LOCATION: University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, 160 W. Burlington Street, Iowa City. Meet in the lobby.

Caelainn Barr

Caelainn Barr is an award-winning writer and journalist from Ireland. She has worked as an editor at the Guardian and was a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and Columbia Journalism School. She teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa, and her work has been published in The Iowa Review.

Lexi Rosa

Lexi Rosa is an award-winning poet, filmmaker, and author, from Chicago residing in Michigan. She has a hip hop and jazz background and uses creative storytelling to tackle issues of mental health and faith, to ultimately lead people to empowerment. Lexi has two books published, The Mountain Climber, a creative story about pursuing one’s dreams, and Spiritual Warfare, a guided journal for navigating through hardships in life. Lexi Rosa is a veteran on the stage, she has performed on stages such as Ted-X, Cliff Bells, Lucille’s and Blue Llama. She is internationally recognized for her poetry film projects and has won Best Message of Hope at the Munich film festival in Germany and featured in Paris, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and more. As a response to the mental health crisis of Michigan students she developed a mental health curriculum that includes poetry called “Became Brave”. You can see her work at lexirosa.poet on all social media platforms or learn more about her organization at becamebrave.com.

Becca Klaver

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal, Empire Wasted, and Ready for the World, as well as several chapbooks. Her latest publications are Midwinter Constellation, a collaborative homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and Greetings from Bowling Green, a chapbook of postcard poems. Her visual poetry appears most recently in ANMLY, and she has created group visual poetry projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. She lives in Iowa City, where she used to run programming for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and continues to organize All Fours Group Chat, a feminist conversation meetup.

Warren C. Longmire

Warren C. Longmire is a Negro poet, performer, and technologist from North Philadelphia. A co-founder of the Excelano Project Spoken Word Collective, his work has appeared in Action, Spectacle, The Cleveland Review of Books, and The American Poetry Review. He was featured in The Best American Poetry 2021 (selected by Tracy K. Smith) and A Black Philadelphia Reader: African American Writings About the City of Brotherly Love. His latest book, Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop], was published by Bunny Presse in 2022. He is currently completing his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Adam Witte

Adam Witte is a student in the Nonfiction Writing MFA program at Iowa, where he is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts and Book Studies from Iowa's Center for the Book. Already an alum (B.A. English/Secondary Education 1996), Adam spent twenty-two years as an Iowa public school teacher before he felt ready to be a student again.

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