We’re so proud to be sharing the latest news from Stacy Mattingly (fiction ’11), who has been helping to spearhead the first Narrative Witness exchange through the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP). The exchange brings together writers and photographers in two cities for online workshops and collaboration; the initial pairing was Caracas, Venezuela, and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Last summer, twenty-two writers and photographers came together with writing and photography facilitators to create work around the “narrative witness” theme. Online workshops were held in English, and translators created drafts from the Spanish and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian so all could participate in discussion and critique. A rich body of work and a new community evolved. IWP has just released the group’s multilingual collection of fiction, nonfiction, and photo essay. Texts are in Spanish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and English. Click here to view the work.
Stacy served as the exchange’s writing workshop facilitator and collection editor. “I’ve had the honor of working with a remarkable group of colleagues,” she says. “The collection is the product of rigor and excellence—and relationship.”
Congratulations, Stacy!
Stacy Mattingly is a U.S. writer and the founder of the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop, a bilingual group of poets and prose writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been leading the workshop since 2012. Stacy holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University, where she was a Marcia Trimble Fellow, a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow, and recipient of the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award. She has worked as a collaborative writer for people in the news on books including, with Ashley Smith, the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, which recounts an Atlanta hostage story now being made into a feature film starring Kate Mara (House of Cards) and David Oyelowo (Selma). Stacy has taught creative writing at Boston University and is slated to teach for Boston’s Grub Street. She is currently writer-in-residence at the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and has just completed a first novel, set in the Balkans.
