Mapping the Imaginary: Supporting Creative Writers Through Programming, Prompts, and Research

Riley Hanick is the author of Three Kinds of Motion: Kerouac, Pollock, and the Making of American Highways (Sarabande Books, 2015). His writing has appeared in The Sonora Review, Seneca Review, No Depression, eyeshot, and Labor World. He has received support from the Jentel and McKnight foundations and served as a writer-in-residence for the University of Iowa Museum of Art. His essay The Pradelles was among the notable essays in the 2010 Best American series. From 2013 to 2016 he was the nonfiction editor at New Madrid and the visiting Watkins Chair in creative writing at Murray State University. He has tutored and helped to facilitate creative writing programs in prisons, public schools, libraries and domestic violence shelters.  Micah Bateman is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Fellow and the assistant director of the New Writers Project M.F.A. program. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as well as the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award, and his chapbook of poems, Polis, is published by the Catenary Press. Micah has worked for Coralville Public Library and the University of Iowa Libraries.  Jennifer Burek Pierce is associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. She has worked in youth services both in Arlington County Public Library (Virginia) and in the Pikes Peak Library District in Colorado. Most recently, she authored a chapter on the readership of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars and the Vlogbrothers fandom for the forthcoming Edinburgh History of Reading (Hammond and Rose, eds.). She created the ;Youth Matters; column and contributed to American Libraries for more than a decade. She was awarded the 2018 Donald G. Davis Article Award by the Library History Round Table (LHRT) for her article The Reign of Children: The Role of Games and Toys in American Public Libraries, 1877-1925, published in Information Culture.