Before joining the Nonfiction Writing Program, Jon Anderson was a longtime staff member of the Chicago Tribune, for which he wrote the now-legendary bi-weekly "City Watch" column. Jon also worked for Time magazine, the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times before joining the Tribune, where he won numerous awards, including the Studs Terkel Humanities Award, whose namesake once noted that " Jon Anderson's manner is deceptively simple, and in that simplicity is something that reaches out and touches you. All of his stories have the understanding of what makes a human being tick." The founder of the famous The Chicagoan magazine, Anderson was working on a long-awaited new book, Marcel Proust & My Cancer & Me: How to Live a Richer, Fuller Life While Battling a Loathsome Disease, before passing away in 2014.  

The Jon Anderson Alumni Reading Room at the Nonfiction Writing Program is named in Jon’s honor.

“Going to Iowa and taking part in the Nonfiction Writing Program turned my life around. In fact, my time there had a certain magical ‘Brigadoon’ quality to it, including the way that my first book came to pass. I was in downtown Iowa City on a Sunday morning outside Prairie Lights bookstore when I ran into Carl Klaus, who more or less ordered me to pull together a collection of my Chicago Tribune columns and dispatch them to him. I said I would. Barely 20 minutes later, I ran into him again at the New Pioneer Food Co-Op. He repeated the order. I again said I would. And the rest is in City Watch, my first book. The dream of almost every journalist is to go deeper into their writing, and the Nonfiction Writing Program helped me make that turn.”