Nearly 80 students, faculty, emeriti, alumni, friends, passersby, and university administrators attended the dedication of the Nonfiction Writing Program’s gorgeous new building on Friday, September 22.

The afternoon’s event featured speakers Lynette Marshall, University of Iowa President Barbara Wilson, Associate Dean Roland Racevskis, Director John D’Agata, NWP 1998, and Third-Year student Sarah Khatry, NWP 2024.

Below we present the speech by Sarah Khatry:

"First, I just want to say thank you all for coming today, for coming here to help us celebrate this beautiful new space and what it represents for our program.

Today, one of the things I’ve been asked to share with you is ‘my Iowa story’—how I came to be here, in Iowa City, in the NWP. My earliest inspiration isn’t unique.  I remember I was around twelve when I finally started paying attention to author bios on the backs of books I admired: “holds an MFA from the University of Iowa.” But between that moment and this one is not a linear progression. 

I’ve also been asked to speak to innovation, and let me tell you, that is something I used to talk a lot about. Because before I came here, I was in tech. I was a practitioner of artificial intelligence—that is someone who built and interpreted AI models.  I worked with text then too but as data, and also with forecasts of global currency fluctuations, with proteomic biomarkers, with ad revenue and baseball player statistics.

There’s so much AI fear out there right now, and while I don’t have the time to really get into it, let me just say I am not that worried. Because whatever innovations are coming out of tech, what those models do not do is make something actually new. For that, you still need people. You need artists. You need writers.

Nonfiction is like AI in one specific way: we draw directly on the world’s data in order to create. It is an artform of constraint, but we are not limited to an echo or a remix or any other amalgamation of what’s come before. Instead, all the words I want to use for nonfiction are slippery. I want to call it capacious, transformative, unstable, even mercurial. It is those constraints that force us to innovate continuously.

For decades, this program has stood as one concrete structure in all that liquid possibility. A house for nonfiction. A house in which its emerging writers can undertake controlled experiments, developing our method and craft. And now, that house finally has a physical structure to call its own, four walls and a roof to hold it. Because for us to innovate, we don’t need raw computer power or to consume every text entry ever written on Wikipedia. We are not digital entities, or at least we’re not only that—our creativity is the most fired up in real space, by using our hands and our eyes and our ears to engage with our work, and this is even more true when we get to do so in the company of other people who also see the complex potential for art in the world around us. 

I’m in my last year here so I’m finding myself thinking about what’s next. I’m getting to teach students in creative nonfiction for the first time. I’m still being taught, mentored by this brilliant team of faculty. So, I’m thinking about the chains of lineage that connect us as writers, these continuities of generosity that propagate forward and backward in time, and how they will now flow through the physical nexus of this building. What does a building do? It gives us solidity. It gives us warmth, safety, and love. With those initial conditions met, it becomes possible for us to confront the truly new. The NWP is now also all these things beyond a graduate program: a physical structure, a community, and an artistic allegiance to the unending variations of the essay.

For all this, I just want to say, thank you again."