
It was announced this week that local poet and Iowa Writers’ Workshop instructor Elizabeth Willis was selected as a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection Alive: New and Selected Poems (NYRB 2015). This year marked the centennial of the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and the arts. Other recent Iowa Writers’ Workshop personnel to be finalists for the prize include Nathan Englander, Denis Johnson, Bob Schacochis, and Karen Russell.