Julie Iromuanya, author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (2015, finalist for multiple awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Debut Fiction Award), and Karen Brennan, author of seven books including, most recently, Monsters (2016) read as part of the UA Prose Series, curated by faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona.
Julie Iromuanya is a writer, scholar, and educator. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she is the daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants. Her creative writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, the Cream City Review, and the Tampa Review, among other journals. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Converging Identities: Blackness in the Modern Diaspora (Carolina Academic Press). She has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction and Family Matters contests, the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship, and the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Iromuanya earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida, and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was a Presidential Fellow and award-winning teacher. She was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. She has also been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Iromuanya is Assistant Professor of English and African and African American Studies. Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is her first novel.
Karen Brennan is the author of seven books of varying genres including the poetry collections little dark (Four Way Books, 2014),The Real Enough World (Wesleyan, 2006), and Here on Earth (Wesleyan, 1989); fiction collections Monsters (Four Way Books, forthcoming), Wild Desire (U Mass Press, 1990), and The Garden in Which I Walk (Fiction Collective 2, 2005); and a memoir, Being with Rachel (Norton, 2001). Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in anthologies from Norton, Penguin, Graywolf, Spuytin Duyvil, Michigan Press, and Georgia University, among others. A National Endowment of the Arts recipient, she is Professor Emerita at the University of Utah, where she also served as fiction editor for Western Humanities Review. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
The UA Prose Series is co-sponsored by the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Department of English