Kerry Howley’s first book, Thrown, was hailed as “a masterful debut” and “a great American story.” Her followup, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, was named a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. A long-time contributor to Bookforum and Reason, Kerry’s work has appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, and she can often be found on television talk shows battling with Republican talking heads. She taught as an Assistant Professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program and now is a staff writer at New York Magazine.

"I came to The Nonfiction Writing Program seeking one thing. As a magazine journalist, I could not afford to spend an hour pouring over a paragraph I admired. As a graduate student, I might devote an entire afternoon to unraveling a Nabokovian sentence, then discuss the same with a dozen fellow writers. The NWP gave me time, time gave me the ability to notice, and noticing produced the first work in which I could truly take pride.

Time was the gift I expected. I did not realize until my second year in the program how thoroughly the faculty were rooting me in a tradition of essayists as far back as Seneca and contemporary as Didion. The community the NWP offers is live and breathing and includes warm-blooded humans donning essay-friendly temporary tattoos while baking essay-themed cupcakes (or did once), but in a larger sense that community stretches backward toward the genre's earliest practitioners. I came with a dilettantish interest in ‘nonfiction’ and left part of a lineage, grounded in a history I would go on to teach my own students.

It took me even longer to see that Iowa’s faculty had helped me form a theoretical perspective from which to evaluate the genre, and which editors would value in my critical work for Bookforum and elsewhere. And when I left? That’s when I knew what it truly felt like to miss a place, the erudite, frigid little city where I could begin the day with a solitary walk in the woods of Hickory Hill and spend the evening among friends in a packed booth at the Foxhead.”