Derek Nnuro is a Ghanaian-American fiction writer based in Iowa City.  He is a graduate of the fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a recipient of the Meta Rosenberg Memorial Fellowship and a Teaching Writing Fellowship.  He was awarded the Robert J. Schulze Fellowship in 2016.  He is working on an untitled novel set in Ghana, West Africa; Houston, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia, and teaches novel writing at the University of Iowa.    

Tameka Cage Conley, PhD is a literary artist who writes fiction, poetry, plays, librettos, and essays. She received a doctoral degree in English in 2006 from Louisiana State University, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship. Her dissertation,“Painful Discourses,” was awarded the annual Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award. She has received writing fellowships from the Cave Canem Poetry Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and Workshops. She is the 2013 recipient of the Eben Demarest Trust Award and the opera, "A Gathering of Sons," for which she wrote the libretto, debuted at the Pittsburgh Festival Opera.  She held a Truman Capote fellowship in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 2016-17 and is currently a Graduate Fellow in her last semester of study. She is working on a debut novel that spans six decades, set between Louisiana and New York City.

Workshop Description

The Reclamation Workshop: A Two Day Cultural and Literary Intensive

This workshop is led by two writers born on opposite sides of the Atlantic—Kumasi, Ghana and Shreveport, Louisiana, respectively—whose pursuit of literary and artistic excellence led them to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which Derek Nnuro is a graduate and Tameka Cage Conley is in her final semester of study. Central to this workshop is the belief in the power of literature of the African Diaspora to embolden and empower, to enrich and sustain, and the ways that our personal histories, including triumph and challenges, inform our art. We will co-lead participants in a transformative literary program that includes study of Black fiction of the Diaspora and issues of identity and the self. We will empower and encourage students to unlock, pursue, and write from the place of their unique voice and intellectual curiosity. The workshop will be a space of inclusion and will open with a translation experience by the instructors. This intensive will include creative writing and open, supportive discussion.