Housing Works played host Sunday night to “Only Connect,” a special reading co-sponsored by Words Without Borders featuring authors from around the world—including István László Geher, Heeduk Ra, and Kei Miller—who’d come to the University of Iowa to take part in an international writing program earlier this year. (The program has been going on since 1967; among the hundreds of earlier fellows is Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.) Amanda ReCupido was there to observe as the writers kicked off a multi-city reading tour:
“‘We’re a United Nations of writers,’ said poet Christopher Merrill, the director of the Iowa program, and several authors chose to read pieces in both their original language as well as the translated English. ‘Literature is not a foreign place,’ said Russian-Israeli fiction writer Alex Epstein. ‘There is always a possibility for a reader to find a different story; that’s what’s both beautiful and strange about writing, no matter what the language.’ We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. In English or otherwise.”