International Lights Salon

Enjoy conversation, connection, and community over light snacks and wine. A collaboration with the International Writing Program, the International Lights Salon provides a space for visiting International writers, local artists, university students, and community members to engage in dialogue.

Join us online or in person. For a zoom link email Jennifer at: [email protected]

Camila Urioste is a Bolivian writer. With Diario de Alicia (2005) she became the first woman in Bolivia to win the National Poetry Award. Between 2009 and 2020 she wrote eight plays, staged in national and international theater festivals in Bolivia and South America. In 2017 she won the Bolivian National Novel Prize for her first novel, Soundtrack (Editorial 3600). She holds an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. Her thesis was a Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel called Manqapacha Delight, which was published in Bolivia in August of 2024 and launched at the International Book Fair. She is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Kerry Howley is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of Bottom’s Up and the Devil Laughs, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In the Times, critic Jennifer Szalai called Bottom’s Up “riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” Howley’s first book, Thrown, was a pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues, translated into five languages, and named among the top 100 books of the year in the New York Times.

Yaiza Berrocal Guevara (playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter; Spain) is the author of a novel, several plays and a screenplay. Her literary work includes Curling (2022), published in the UK in 2025 and forthcoming in Greek in 2026. She is currently working on her second novel, Las promesas. As a playwright, she received Spain’s Calderón de la Barca National Prize for La cadena del frío, later staged in Sala Beckett, Barcelona. Her other plays include Intenta viure sense mi, Ni temeré les feres, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca antes representadas (documentary theatre) and Flesh Market. She is also the screenwriter of the animated feature Black Butterflies, winner of the Goya Award for Best Animated Film, as well as the Gaudí, Forqué, Quirino, and Platino awards, and has written for prime-time television series.

Juan Carlos Reyes Vázquez (fiction writer, screenwriter, filmmaker; Mexico) is the author of five books of short fiction, including Impala (2021), Para subir y caer (2015), Iktumbe (2014), Circo de pulgas (2010), and Imagínate lejos (2002). His fiction often explores memory, loss, violence, childhood, altered bodies, and the fragile border between the intimate and the strange. His work has appeared in the literary journals Crítica and Blanco Móvil, as well as in the anthologies Cuentistas de Tierra Adentro 2007–2017 and Cuerpos Rotos. He has also written and directed twelve short films, including Silla eléctrica para moscas, winner of Best Animated Short Film at the San Diego Latino Film Festival, and Absoluto vacío ensordecedor, winner of Best Experimental Short Film at the Dubai International Shortfilm Festival.