Season 05
Episode 02
Air date: 1/25/2012 at 2 PM
This Lit Show spotlights Ink Lit Mag, a new student-run literary journal at the University of Iowa. Ink‘s publishers discuss the origins and future of the magazine, as well as their vision for its role in the community.
On-air guests include Michael Leali, Ink executive board Member; Sevy Perez, Ink co-editor and chief creative director of Issue One; Alyssa Rhodes, poetry editor; Audrey Smith, Ink executive board member; and Danny Khalastchi, Ink‘s publisher, who is the Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Certificate in Writing Program.
This episode also features Alyssa Rhodes reading selected student work from the magazine, and Danny Khalastchi shares one of poet Marvin Bell’s contributions to Ink‘s first issue: “Thirteen Statements About Writing Poetry (Work-In-Progress).”
GUEST BIOS
Daniel Khalastchi is the Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Certificate in Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the author of Manoleria, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award for poetry. A co-founder and editor of Rescue Press (an independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid collections), Daniel serves as the faculty advisor and publisher of Ink Lit Mag.
Michael Leali is a senior studying English and Secondary Education from Oswego, IL. He is also in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Track and a minor in music. For the past two years, Michael has been the IWLLC RA and has loved every moment of it.
Sevy Perez was born and raised around Chicago. His creative philosophy is rooted in music. In high school he received formal editor and design training from Ball State University and Indiana University, and he came to the University of Iowa because David Foster Wallace made him want to be a writer, among other things. Sevy is in the middle of creating his own major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and is also minoring in Philosophy and declaring for the new Undergraduate Certificate in Writing.
Alyssa Rhodes is originally from Denver, but just moved back from Singapore. A first-year student here at the UI, she is the Poetry Editor at Ink Lit Mag and is majoring in journalism.
Audrey Smith is a sophomore at the University of Iowa and is a Resident Assistant for the Iowa Writers’ Living Learning Community. She is studying English and is part of the Creative Writing Track.
Season 05
Episode 01
Air date: 1/23/2011, 2PM CST
On this Lit Show, fiction writer and essayist Sara Levine discusses her debut novel, Treasure Island!!!, a full-throated, subversive, and very funny homage to Robert Louis Steveson’s classic. We talked about how she came to the original Stevenson classic, how to craft an unreliable narrator, and the American obsession with self-help books.
Levine, who was formerly a professor at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, has published short fiction in American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her collection, Short Dark Oracles, was a finalist for the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition.
In the last third of the program, Sara Levine reads a selection from the book.



