Corridor Buzz - The Premier Source of Arts & Entertainment News and Information for the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor

UNESCO board interviews director finalists

By Gigi Wood

The City of Literature board expects to hire a director by early February.

Iowa City was named the third City of Literature by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2008. The Creative Cities Network was launched by UNESCO in October 2004 to help unlock the creative, social and economic potential of cultural industries and promote UNESCO’s goals of cultural diversity.

Now it needs a director. The Iowa City UNESCO board of directors began interviewing candidates for the position in December and has narrowed the pool to a small group of candidates, which it has been interviewing this month.

“With any luck, we’ll be able to make an announcement in a few weeks,” says Christopher Merrill, president of Iowa City’s UNESCO City of Literature board of directors in Iowa City and director of the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

The director will report to the board of directors and will have an office at the Iowa City Public Library. The board is looking for someone with demonstrated experience in arts management.

“(We’re looking for) someone who can create what is in effect a startup organization, put together the infrastructure, reach out to stakeholders throughout the community and eventually the state and will be able to work on the international stage, as well,” he says. “Someone who can raise money, someone who can understand the ways in which literature works and someone who can devise new programs, who can bring new ideas to the community, someone who can connect one constituency to another.”

The director would likely start during the spring and whoever is named to the position will work first on coordinating future projects.

“Our task is to find the right director who will be able to take a lot of these ideas and figure out how to prioritize and what’s possible given the budget that he or she will be working with and what the lay of the land looks like,” Merrill says. “They’ll work on everything from working on signage to working with economic development people to tourist boards to try to figure out how we make central in everybody’s imagination around the state, around the world the importance of Iowa City as the place where great writing begins.”

Iowa City joins Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia, as cities of literature.

“We have the potential to create one of the most dynamic organizations around, especially if we get the right person and that’s exciting,” he says.

Edinburgh was named the first City of Literature in 2004. Home to a strong literary tradition and many local authors, the city of 468,000 hosts readings and festivals centered on literature throughout the year.

This article originally appeared in the Corridor Business Journal.