Why I Write Wednesday: IUWC Participant Yohanca Delgado

Answering life’s questions through storytelling remains a challenging endeavor. Former IUWC participant Yohanca Delgado does so by crafting complex narratives to process the way the world works.

Yohanca Delgado is a writer and fiction fanatic who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Delgado’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including Story, The Believer, and The Paris Review. She is an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse and a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Delgado has lived across the globe, including Paris, Cairo, and Kyiv. She is a native Spanish speaker but also studied French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Russian. With her unique background and history of rich experiences, Delgado explores what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.

Delgado decided to attend IUWC when she saw that Kiese Laymon was teaching the nonfiction workshop in 2018. Attending as a Don Belton Fellow, she was able to work with a cohort of kind, thoughtful and intelligent writers. At the time, Delgado was unsure of which to pursue: fiction or nonfiction. After a week of “multifaceted richness” at Indiana, she left feeling a sense of “renewed permission” to pursue both interests.

As Delgado described it, “learning about narrative voice from Chanelle Benz, cartoons from Jason Adam Katzenstein, poetry from Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, [and] thrillers from Alison Gaylin,” left her feeling uniquely inspired to explore all different modes of storytelling. As she puts it, “There is no other workshop quite like Indiana’s.” 

Delgado takes great pride in what she writes. “For me, writing is inextricably tied to thinking,” she said. Thinking back to her past experiences around the world, Delgado writes because she has millions of questions to think through. As she puts it, “story just happens to be the language I use to work those questions out.”

Yohanca Delgado’s Personal Site.