The Blog

We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2011 contest. In fiction, the winner is John Van Kirk's "Landscape with Boys," about a neighborhood civil war. Fiction judge Allan Gurganus called it "a muscular, comic, ambitious, and very pure piece of writing."

For fiction runner-up, Gurganus chose Suzanne Scanlon's "Her 37th Year, An Index," a story told in alphabetized topic headings, describing it as "a thoroughly engrossing almanac of desire."

Patricia Hampl, nonfiction judge, said her choice for winner, "Life Care Center" by Helen Phillips, "manages its desperate material"—a visit to a severely disabled sister—"without indulgence."

The nonfiction runner-up, "City by the Woods: A Memoir" by Maria Rapoport, was, Hampl writes, "a real consideration of the lingering effects of emigration."

Last month, as it does three times a year, a new Human Rights Index appeared on the TIR Online section of our web site. But this Index—on the theme of gender inequality in the U.S.—has the distinction of being the 30th Human Rights Index published by The Iowa Review, and thus marks ten years of a partnership between TIR and the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights (UICHR).

Burns Weston, Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Iowa Law School, first wrote a Human Rights Index in 2001 at the suggestion of then–TIR editor David Hamilton. “The original idea was to acknowledge the context within which we find room for art,” says Hamilton. “Of course the Harper’s Index was something of a model.”