FOREST CITY, IOWA, January 16, 2024 – Waldorf University will host the 10^th annual Top of Iowa High School Creative Writing Contest for regional high school students on March 14, 2024. The contest will culminate with a one-day writing festival on the Waldorf University campus, where winners will be announced. The festival will include opportunities for students to attend talks on varying aspects of creative writing, participate in an open mic, and attend a reading by Waldorf’s Distinguished visiting writer, RS Deeren. Deeren will be reading from his debut short story collection Enough to Lose, a vivid portrait of life in rural America where hard-working families fight for survival in a home that is increasingly unrecognizable and untenable.   

RS Deeren is the author of Enough to Lose: Stories. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia College Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was the 2016 Union League Club of Chicago Library's Writer in Residence and a 2015 Luminarts Cultural Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. The title story to Enough to Lose has been anthologized in Tales of Two Americas edited by John Freeman. His fiction, nonfiction and poetry appear in The Great Lakes Review, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic and elsewhere. He is from rural Michigan, where he worked as a line cook, a substitute teacher, a landscaper, a banker and a lumberjack. He is an assistant Professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn.