The Blog

2017–18 Internships at The Iowa Review

TIR Staff

The Iowa Review (TIR), the University of Iowa’s literary magazine, seeks two undergraduate interns for the academic year 2017–18 as part of a partnership with the Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates (ICRU). Please note that we are currently not offering a summer internship.

Qualifications

Candidates must be University of Iowa undergraduates, have a UI GPA of 3.33 or above, be entering their junior or senior year, and be English majors. They should be detail-oriented, self-starting, and able to work independently, and they should have a strong interest in literary writing, editing, and publishing.

Duties

Interns will work 6 hours a week from August 21, 2017, through May 4, 2018 (University breaks not included), and receive a scholarship of $2,000 ($1,000 per semester).

Mike Scalise's THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE

Ethan Madore

There’s a scene in Mike Scalise’s The Brand New Catastrophe where Scalise, twentysomething and struggling to find full-time work in New York City, arrives in Central Park for a job interview. In short, it’s a catastrophe. Scalise, having spent days imagining this job—and its benefits package—as his last chance, a final lifeline into honorable employment and actual health insurance, arrives sickly with nerves. Distracted by an errant German shepherd, he admits to the interviewer that he just “wants a job, any job.” She gives him the look, an expression of resigned disapproval Scalise practically majored in.

A micro-interview with Junot Díaz

Melissa Mogollon

Author Junot Díaz, unflinching and unprecedented with his craft, is known for illuminating the U.S. Latinx immigrant experience. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, short story writer, teacher, essayist, and activist, his writing has made storytelling accessible to communities that did not previously see themselves in literature—as readers, writers, and people.

Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown; The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.

"From the Workshop to War": An Interview with Janine di Giovanni

Christopher Merrill

When I was reporting on the war in Bosnia, I always read the dispatches of John Burns, Roger Cohen, and Janine di Giovanni, who seemed to me to understand not only the political and military dimension of the unfolding tragedy, but also its human consequences. Each in their own way practiced the working methods of a photographer friend who told me she liked to “get into people’s beer,” that is, to spend time with those she wished to portray. What resulted were intimate photographs of people in extremis; showing their human faces.

Dinner in Los Angeles, Raining in July

Max Ritvo

The black night is a sea urchin.
The sea urchin is my mother
moving on spiny feet,
meat clotting with her desires.

But meat isn’t the only thing
that moves the feet—
the cold sky puckers them,
shafts of gnats tickle them,
and the aroma of all things burns on the ground.

The feet won’t obey her.
Every foot has a hunch in the wilderness.

As the sprinklers brutalize the window,
the sun setting into city light,

you ask to see my plate,
my plate, still studded with green beans.

Thinking fast, I pitch up my voice into a story
about Dad trying to plug up gophers in the yard.

About how when Prajapati opened his mouth,
he birthed the fire that eats fathers—
like a hose spraying gophers into his face.

The only stars left
are mothers.