JULIE IROMUANYA is the author of MR. AND MRS. DOCTOR (Coffee House Press, 2015), a finalist for the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Literature, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction, and a San Francisco Chronicle “Best of 2015,” a Star Tribune Critics Choice, and a “Best Minnesota Books 2015.” Her second novel, A Season of Light, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books (2024).

Born and raised in the American Midwest, she is the daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants. Her creative writing has also appeared in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, the Cream City Review, and the Tampa Review, among other journals. Most recently, her scholarly-critical work appears or is forthcoming in Meridians, Callaloo, and Afropolitan Literature as World Literature. 

Iromuanya earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was a Richard H. Larson Fellow, a Presidential Fellow, and an award-winning teacher.

She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. She was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. She has also been a Kimbilio Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Jane Tinkham Broughton Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow in France, a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House in France, a Jan Michalski Fellow at the “Treehouses” in Switzerland, and the Eternal Vada Fellow at the Sangam House residency in India. Her work has also been supported by residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, Villa Lena Foundation, and Villa Ruffieux at Chateau Mercier.

Iromuanya is an assistant professor for the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. She is also affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. In the past, she has served on the faculty at the University of Dayton, the University of Tampa, Northeastern Illinois University (Chicago), the University of Arizona’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and she taught for seven summers at the Johns Hopkins University-Center for Talented Youth, both in the U.S. and in Hong Kong.

Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press, 2015) is her first novel. Her second novel, A Season of Light, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books (2024).