Gabriel Houck, Jennifer S. Cheng, and Lawrence Ypil —all alumni of the University of Iowa’s renowned Nonfiction Writing Program—share stories, poems, and essays from their recent books.

Originally from New Orleans, Gabriel Houck has earned MFAs from the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he is currently a Lecturer in the English Department. His first collection, You or a Loved One, won the 2017 Orison Fiction Prize, and will be published by Orison Books. His short stories, “The Dot Matrix” and “When the Time Came,” were selected as distinguished stories in the 2017 and 2015 editions of The Best American Short Stories, respectively. Gabriel has received scholarships and fellowships from the Tin House Workshops (2016), the Sewanee Writers Workshop (2017), the Vermont Studio Center (2018), and his fiction appears in Glimmer Train, The Sewanee Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, as well as many other journals.

Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms. She is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award; House A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. Her writing appears in Tin House, Conjunctions, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco.

Lawrence L. Ypil Is a poet and essayist from Cebu, Philippines. He is the author of The Highest Hiding Place (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009) and has received MFAs from Washington University in St. Louis and the Nonfiction Program of the University of Iowa. He teaches Writing at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore.