Join us for a conversation with Susan Hill Newton, Alisha Jeddeloh and Chuy Renteria about publishing with a University Press

About the event

Enjoy conversation, connection, and community over light snacks and wine. Porchlight’s weeknight salon series provides a space for visiting writers, local artists, university students, and community members to engage in dialogue.

Susan Hill Newton has worked in all realms of book editing, serving both trade and academic publishers and nonprofits. Her breadth of experience ranges from acquisitions to book development, line editing to program direction, to the writing and editing of marketing collateral. She presently sits as the managing editor at University of Iowa Press, where she is charged with overseeing the editorial program of roughly 30 books per year. Susan lived in Denver, Colorado for more than twenty years, before making the move to Iowa City with her husband and two daughters.

Jesus “Chuy” Renteria is an author, artist, dancer, and teacher, but above all, they are a storyteller. Born in Iowa City and raised in West Liberty, Iowa, both sides of his family are from border towns in Mexico that transplanted to meatpacking towns in the Midwest. Growing up in West Liberty, he oscillated between the Mexican, Laotian, and small-town cultures that made up Iowa’s first majority-Hispanic town. Chuy tells stories celebrating the spaces between cultures, of mangled Spanglish and generational clashes, of the messiness of people finding themselves. In addition to his writing, Chuy is a Success Coach with the non-profit RSFIC (Resilient Sustainable Future For Iowa City) where they support community partners looking to create meaningful connections with their neighbors. They write the Substack, “Of Spanglish and Maximalism,” which details, among other things, the trials of being a former DEI professional in upper academia. They were the host of The Englert’s Writers of Color Reading Series podcast. Their first full-length publication, a memoir titled We Heard it When We Were Young, released in November 2021 with The University of Iowa Press. He spends his free time with his wife, Darcy, and their first-born, Marisol Alana.

Alisha Jeddeloh is a writer; the fiction editor of Brink, an in-print literary journal dedicated to publishing hybrid, cross-genre work of both emerging and established creatives; and an editor of the We the Interwoven series of bicultural anthologies. In her writing, she explores the lies we tell ourselves and others, as well as the tension between individual and community, insiders and outsiders. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her family, where she is currently working on a novel that examines the intersection of astrology, technology, and transcendence. She can be found at alishajeddeloh at gmail or @alishajeddeloh on Instagram.