This year, Zodwa Nyoni was selected for the Iowa International Writers Programme (IWP) residency.

The residency gives writers time to work on their own projects, whilst introducing them to the social and cultural fabrics of the United States and enabling them to take part in American university life.

In this guest blog post, Zodwa reflects on the experience.

 

Sundays at Prairie Lights

By Zodwa Nyoni

20 September 2026

It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon in Iowa City. There were thunderstorms last night and into the early hours of the morning. The pelting rain on the windows reminds me of home, but the greyness here is deceptive. The Midwest gets humid. The big green clock on the corner of S Clinton Street and E Washington Street says it’s 73°F. I wait for the screen to convert to Celsius before I decide how I feel about the weather. It’s 23°C.  If I was in Manchester, this would be a pretty good day in September. But after five-weeks here, I grumble at how much cooler it feels now. It was hitting the mid 80s to 90°F when we arrived. Funny how even in my own thoughts I can’t escape the British urge to muse on about the weather.

It’s nearly 4pm. Sundays in the city means the Prairie Lights readings are on. The bookshop runs an annual public event featuring the IWP residents. Today is the fourth instalment in the series.

I walk a block over to the bookshop, passing Target for the second time. Target is my Søstrene Grene here. Each time I go in, I don’t need anything, but I discover things I want in this shop. My teenage niece has already asked me to abandon some of my wardrobe in favour of bringing back American snacks. I told her, I scanned items on the Yuka app and it said that some additives have suspected carcinogens. She said, “it’s okay.” and sends me TikToks of her requests.

Before I go upstairs to the event, I browse the bookshelves again. I’ve already bought three books from Prairie Lights. There are illustrated stickers of the bookshop by the till. I’ve stuck one in each book and dated it. I’ll flick through the pages of these memories years from now. Upstairs, the central bookcases between the psychology and cooking sections have been pushed aside to make room for rows of moss green plastic chairs. Julietta hosts the afternoons. She is the IWP co-ordinator aka our wrangler and encyclopaedia of all things Iowa city.

After reading the residents’ extracts online, I enjoy these events because I get to hear their work in their own voices, accompanied with anecdotes that limited biography word counts couldn’t contain.

The first reading took place at the end of August. It featured, Sarah Gilmartin (Ireland) and Iván Hochman (Argentina). They were joined by a local author, and IWP Senior Editor Lauren Haldeman; and Iowa Literary Translation MFA candidate Devanshi Khetarpal. We were pulled into novels about a sex scandal at a high-end Dublin restaurant and Milo’s anxieties over moving out of his parents’ house. Lauren presented illustrated comics based on the wonder and weirdness of everyday life. Devanshi rounded the afternoon off with tender poems rooted in an Indian upbringing.

The second reading featured, Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad (Netherlands), Nina Dragičević (Slovenia), and Hidayat Nordin (Singapore). They were accompanied by Iowa Literary Translation MFA candidate Zubair Ibrahim Siddiqui. This afternoon was a symphony of languages. We heard poems in Arabic, Dutch, Slovenian, Malay and English. The Q&A delved into the nature of translation and asked questions on how we are transformed and understood between languages. Literary translation is tied to power, history and colonialism.  And so, the relationship between a writer and translator must be intimate. On several late nights I’ve witnessed in the corner of the hotel lobby, IWP writer Harumi Kawaguchi and her translator Rina Kikuchi pulled closely into screens and each other as they delicately interpret Harumi’s thoughts and feelings from Japanese into English. This is a decade long ritual they have practiced. I am romanced by the idea of being so deeply understood.

The third reading was for the scriptwriters. It included me, Jun Li (Hong Kong), and Ingeborg von Zadow (Germany).  We were accompanied by Iowa Playwrights Workshop MFA candidate Darrin Terpstra. Our stage was simple. We had three mics, actors and an audience. Peter Brook would have been pleased. The act of theatre was engaged. There was a political throughline in the readings, certainly from myself, having presented extracts from my play, ‘Liberation’ about the Fifth Pan African Congress; and from Jun-Li whose play, ‘In A Perfect World’ about three generations of Chinese people living in the same house in New York after a civil war in 2036.  Jun-Li also spoke about the difficulty of gaining funding for LGBT films and the government censoring the wider distribution of his work.

This reading reminded me of our first residents’ night out. We sat at George’s outdoor patio, which is basically a ring-fenced area next to the bins with garden chairs. But in Iowa City –  a dive bar with craft beers, a cacophony of accents and cigarette smoke twirling in the amber glow of street lights – this was our very own Lena Dunham’s Girls episode (If you know, you know). That evening we talked about the writer’s voice. Where does it come from? What is it shaped by? Why is it important? Who controls it? From England to Singapore, Germany, France, South Korea, Romania, Netherlands and Hong Kong, we had varying sweet and bitter experiences. But still, against the odds we were here, excited about new ideas and waking others from hibernation.

This fourth reading featured Nir Ratzkovsky (Israel) and Juan Carlos Reyes Vázquez (Mexico). They were accompanied by University of Iowa Executive Director of the Office of Writing and Communication, Daniel Khalastchi, and Robert P. Dana Director of the Centre for the Literary Arts at Cornell College, Rebecca Entel. What was common about their poetry and fiction was the theme of family histories. Nir explored the origins of a surname. Juan Carlos took us back to a Mexican childhood. Daniel recalled the birth of his son. Rebecca unfolded the lives of three generations of women.

In the Q&A, I asked if they all felt a responsibility of being the family archivist. I am pondering this notion for myself this week.  What does it mean to hold the weight of others and myself through my writing? How do I decide what is worth keeping? What literary form best preserves from damage or decay? Who is willing to donate artifacts of their pasts to me?

As writers do, the panel had profound answers, but it’s what Juan Carlos said that soaked into me. He said, if he didn’t record his family then nothing would be documented. And in that, it’s both the beautiful and what people wished was forgotten that he preserves in stories.

These last few weeks, I have been writing of my family. Of mothers and daughters, of native lands and foreign invaders, of the secrets of yesterday being the truths of today; and ultimately of what it has made of us – or is still making. There are five weeks left in the residency. How much time does one need to unpack generations for answers on who we are and what our family legacy will be? And am I even the trusted narrator for this story?

As I walked back to the hotel I take a detour, not to Target but to Bread Garden Market for a toffee cookie. I don’t even have a sweet tooth, but this round thing is the result of immaculate baking science. It’s crispy on the edges and gooey soft at the centre. It’s not too thick to make the gooiness disgusting, and not too thin to make the snap a cracker.

As a tender overthinker, I often burden myself with the thought of the responsibility to document. It’s easy to think that I am the obvious archivist in my family because what I write ends up in these formularized categories – a playtext, a poem, a TV show, an article.  But the truth is, I come from a long line of archivists.

A father who had a 1972 Yashica camera and numerous photo albums and plastic bags filled with envelopes of unprocessed film. A mother who sits behind a sewing machine recalling from memory seven generations of a family tree without missing a stitch. A sister who drew pictures and wrote raps in homemade diaries. Another sister who is a chef and cooks traditional meals for her children and clients from the red Zimbabwean soil she tills yearly. A brother who mixes Southern African dance movements with European club culture in his setlists. A grandfather, I find in black and white radical periodicals. A village that remembers a time before the Zimbabwe-Botswana border split its tongue. We are all collecting and documenting in different forms, across different times.

So, to lessen my burden, it is best to imagine that I am not solely responsible for a definitive archive of us. But to write of the past to where I am now. Then maybe one day, a future generation (maybe my niece if TikTok and American additives haven’t rotted her brain) will ask the same questions I am pondering. And she will take whatever I eventually write in Iowa city, just as I have taken books, pictures and anecdotes. She will document in whatever form she chooses to make sense of her own existence. And so, the archivists will go on and on and on.

About Zodwa Nyoni

Zodwa Nyoni is a Zimbabwean-born playwright, screenwriter, librettist, and director. Her debut play, BOI BOI IS DEAD won the Channel 4 Playwrights’ Scheme in 2014. It was also a finalist for the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2014/15.

Since, her plays have been produced in the UK, France, Germany, USA, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She has written two radio plays, LOVE AGAIN (BBC Radio 3) and A KHOISAN WOMAN (Drama on 3); and three short films: MAHOGANY, NOTES ON BEING A LADY and the award winning, THE ANCESTORS (BBC Films and BFI Network).

Zodwa supports multidisciplinary artists and writers. She’s currently an associate dramaturg for Tiata Fahodzi and Fifth Word Theatre; and a Lecturer in Scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was an international fellow on Oxbelly’s inaugural Episodic Program in Greece. She is a BAFTA Connect member and was on the writing team for Netflix’s spin-off series, CASTLEVANIA: NOCTURNE. Series 2 premiered in January 2025.

Zodwa followed this with LIBERATION, a play celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Fifth Pan African Congress a Royal Exchange Manchester as part of Manchester International Festival. It was nominated for Best Playwright at the Black British Theatre Awards and is longlisted for the Alfred Fagon Award. She also premiered a new opera; TEARS ARE NOT MEANT TO STAY AT INSIDE for Buxton International Festival.

Zodwa is currently developing a new stage play for Bristol Old Vic, writing a feature film supported by the Early Development Fund BFI; and is a script editor on a Film 4 project written and directed by Adeyemi Micheal.