I came to Iowa to find more information on Atukwei Okai. He was a Ghanaian poet and founder of the Pan-African Writers Association. But also, he was a student at the Gorky Literary Institute in 1962-1967 where he studied at the poetry seminar led by Vasilii Zhuravlev. When I was in Ghana in summer 2023, I met Okai’s wife Beatrice who told me that in 1978-1979 she and Atukwei spent in Iowa. Iowa? That’s interesting, I thought. The most famous creative writing program - Iowa Writers’ Workshop is in Iowa. It turned out that Okai was not in the Workshop itself, but in the International Writing Program created by Paul Engle in 1967. Anyway, I thought it would be really cool to go to Iowa and work with their archives. Okai is one of the few people who benefited from both socialist and capitalist creative writing institutions, and I wanted to learn more about his time in Iowa.

Anyway, this post is not even about Okai. I just wanted to explain how I ended up going to Iowa and working with Paul Engle’s Papers. I found there soooo much interesting stuff. The International Writing Program was unique! Yes, the Gorky Institute also invited foreign writers, but the scope of this activity was more than modest. On the contrary, the IWP hosted about 30-35 writers every year. Of course, I am not a specialist on American literature, and I probably won’t write myself about the IWP, but I hope that more researchers will get interested in this topic. For now, I am really excited to read the book University of Literature by Loren Glass, one chapter of which is devoted to the IWP. I hope the book will come out soon!

Nonetheless, the whole point of this post in to share this one picture. The IWP organized English classes for those writers who did not speak English very well. In Paul Engle’s Papers, I found various materials on these classes. And this dialogue is my favorite! I wish we studied something similar in my high school! Enjoy!

slang

Source: University of Iowa Special Collections, MsC0514, Paul Engle Papers, Box 26.