SWO takes place July 8–26, 2024.

Application Timeline:

• Applications are reviewed in the order we receive them and seats are limited. Apply now to secure your spot!

Program Events:

The closing ceremony will take place on Friday, July 26th and will feature our digital anthology.

Summer Writing Online is a unique opportunity to work with world-class faculty at The Writing University. The art of creative writing will be taught through a combination of seminar discussions and critiques of class members' work. The creative writing produced by the students will be in response to the literature and techniques discussed in class. You will start your day with class time and structural approaches to writing. Next, you will have an opportunity to take electives in Screenwriting and Poetry. To round out your day, we will have Author Talks, Industry Experts, events, and more. All students will have time to workshop, critique, and give feedback utilizing the critical response process (either in the morning for our Eastern/Midwestern students, or in the afternoon for our West/West coast students).

The University of Iowa’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Program is partnering with the Belin-Blank Center to provide an exciting program designed for talented high school writers from across the country. Instructors include University of Iowa faculty, graduates, and graduate students from the English Department, the Writers Workshop, and special visiting authors.

Nina Morrison is a playwright, director and teaching artist. She is the Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Playwriting 2019-2020 at the University of Iowa. Select recent credits: Nina’s play Féminaal was presented in Minneapolis by The Grumble Theater; her play Ibsanity was presented in the mainstage season at Fordham University, NYC; she directed Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men at Riverside Theatre. She was a finalist for New Dramatists in 2018 and 2019, and a 2019 finalist for the Jerome. Nina is currently based in Iowa City. Before Iowa, she was based in New York City for 17 years where her work as a playwright and director was presented at Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, The HOT! Festival, the Little Theatre series, the NYC International Fringe Festival, Upright Citizens Brigade, The Peoples’ Improv Theater, and the Yardmeter series among others. Nina was a Dixon Place Artist-in-Residence, and she was an LMCC WORKSPACE Writer-in-Residence, a residency program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She holds an MFA in Directing and an MFA in Playwriting both from the University of Iowa.

Andrew David King is a Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer and Visiting Assistant Professor in the University of Iowa's English Department. His work spans across genres, but focuses on the intersections of poetry, the essay, and visual art. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, and a Graduate Certificate from the University of Iowa Center for the Book. His writing has appeared with ZYZZYVA, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and other publications, and was included in the University of Virginia Press’s Best New Poets 2018 anthology. He is currently a Research Assistant at the Walt Whitman Archive and the author of the chapbook Fire Sonnets (Clepsydra Press, 2018).