City of Literature

Good news! Iowa City has been designated the world’s third “City of Literature” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a distinction shared with Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia.

For those of you who have escaped my propaganda in the past, Iowa City is home to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and faculty and students of UIowa have gathered up 25 Pulitzer Prizes. Alumni include Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, Rita Dove, Jane Smiley, Robert Hass, John Irving, Ann Patchett, and Curtis Sittenfeld. Oh, and LNL favorite Jeremy Jackson.

Iowa City has 11 literary presses, a library whose borrowers outnumber the city’s population (patrons from neighboring areas can become members), and a series of bronze plaques on the downtown sidewalks, each honoring an IC writer. Additionally, local bookstore Prairie Lights broadcasts author readings on the radio and TV. Well, Prairie Lights really deserves its own blog post, which I will start working on soon.

So come one, come all, to North America’s only City of Literature. You can sleep on my futon and drink my beer.