About Iowa Writes

Since 2006, Iowa Writes has featured the work of Iowa-identified writers (whether they have Iowa roots or live here now) and work published by Iowa journals and publishers on The Daily Palette. Iowa Writes features poetry, fiction, or nonfiction twice a week on the Palette.

In November of 2008, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated Iowa City, Iowa, the world's third City of Literature, making the community part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.

Iowa City has joined Edinburgh, Scotland and Melbourne, Australia as UNESCO Cities of Literature.

Find out more about submitting by contacting iowa-writes@uiowa.edu

FRANCES CANNON
Pickleweed (Salicornia pacifica)

Frances Cannon hails from the coasts, both East and West.  She juggles too many passions for her own good: bookmaking, printmaking, writing, cooking, the art of the garden, puppetry.  She strives toward a certain aesthetic: a mixture of oddity, adventure, and natural beauty.  She recently self-published a handmade book of silkscreened prints and poems called Image Burn, and is in a constant state of artistic production.  She studied poetry and printmaking at the University of Vermont and is currently pursuing her MFA in nonfiction at the University of Iowa.

We enter the salt marsh with fingers crossed
for flicker feathers and boletes.
The hillside provide bones: a clean spine, intact,
a doe skull with a green map etched on her temples
like pathways on a molded topographic globe.
We lose our shoes to the bowels of the pickleweed carpet,
one breathing, gurgling mass of beaded glasswort,
sandfire, little red-tipped fingers clutching digested crabs
the size of spiders, whose sun-bleached exo-skeletons
glimmer against the dull estero palate.
A chorus of marbled godwits chant
kow-eto kow-eto as they lift collectively into the fog.
The flag woven of their wings pulses a few beats and fades.

Frances' website