Aviya Kushner, the 2016-2017 Howard Foundation Fellow in Creative Nonfiction, directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her first book, The Grammar of God, is about the intense experience of reading the Bible in English after an entire life of reading it in Hebrew. It’s been hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “brilliant,” and by Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky as “a passionate, personal, and illuminating essay about nothing less than meaning itself.” She is also the author of a book of poetry, Wolf Lamb Bomb, with Orison Books. Her writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Partisan Review, Poets & Writers, A Public Space, the Wilson Quarterly, and Zoetrope: All-Story, and she has also worked as a travel columnist for The International Jerusalem Post and as a poetry columnist for BarnesandNoble.com. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, and serves as a contributing editor at A Public Space and a mentor for The National Yiddish Book Center.

“When I was leaving Iowa, a classmate said softly: 'It’s time to leave the magic for someone else.' I still borrow that line whenever anyone asks me about Iowa; I say—'it was magic.' I don’t know how else to explain Iowa to anyone who has not lived and written there. In Iowa, writing is central, not peripheral. The essay as an art form is celebrated at the NWP, but more deeply, good writing of all kinds is loved, great writing is worshipped. And it’s not just the classes and the faculty, but the community. It’s Paul Ingram at Prairie Lights Books, who always knows the perfect book to recommend. It’s that great Moby Dick course held in a peach-colored living room. It’s the incredible International Writing Program, which brings writers from all over the world to Iowa each fall, where I once smiled across the table at a giant of Mongolian fiction as I read his work in translation. It’s the Farmer’s Market, where the bearded fresh-egg farmer from Kalona always asks how the writing is going. It’s the corn, the affordability, the quiet. For a few years you can just be.

“Whenever I think I have gotten all I can out of Iowa, that the magic has been permanently handed to someone else, a writer younger and more innocent, a writer less banged-up by the world—someone I knew back then shows up, in the cold, the rain, the crises of confidence. Someone reminds me how much writing matters, and how much it matters to me. Iowa extends past geographical borders of time and space; it is a community in the lonely struggle to get it right and make it beautiful, however long it takes.”