Amy Margolis, Director,joined the Festival in 1990. She received her M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow in fiction. She has taught writing both as part of the Festival and in the undergraduate program at Iowa. Amy is from Kansas City, where everything matches.

Caryl Pagel is a 2007-08 Post-Graduate Writing Fellow at The University of Iowa. She holds an M.F.A. from both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Octopus Magazine, Parcel, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. This will be Caryl’s third summer with the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and she currently teaches a class on ghosts in literature at The University of Iowa.

Jeanne Stoakes (B.A., Sociology, Drake University) is often the first voice one hears when calling to register for the Festival, not your usual electronic/digital voice. Jeanne lives in the heartland of Johnson County off of a gravel road with her favorites: Patrick, basset hounds, cats, roosters and the gardens.