Welcome to Fern and Joe!

...our newest column duo

Nov 07, 2022

Fern and Joe are fun, funny, talented writers living in Ames, Iowa. As of today, they are members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.

Please welcome, Fern and Joe!

Here are their bios:

Fern Kupfer, retired from the English department at Iowa State, is a writer whose essays and articles have appeared in Newsweek, Newsday, Redbook, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, The Women’s Review of Books, Writer’s Digest, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Parents Magazine, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan and The Des Moines Register; her essays have been widely anthologized in college texts. Popular collections include Nice Jewish Girls (Plume/Penguin), The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers on Fairytales. Novels include: Surviving the Seasons, No Regrets and the mystery, Love Lies (Simon and Schuster). Also two memoirs: the best-selling Before and After Zachariah, a story about family life with a severely disabled child (Chicago Review Press), and Leaving Long Island.

Joseph Geha, a Professor Emeritus of the creative writing program at Iowa State University, is the author of Through and Through: Toledo Stories, a collection of short stories inspired by his experiences growing up in an émigré Arab American community. His poems, plays, and short stories have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including Esquire, Growing Up Ethnic in America, and The New York Times. His fiction was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Pushcart Prize. It was chosen for inclusion in the Permanent Collection, Arab-American Archive, of the Smithsonian Institution. In 2013 he was named an Arab American Book Award Winner for his novel Lebanese Blonde. Kitchen Arabic, Joe’s memoir/cookbook will come out in March 2023 from The University of Georgia Press.