I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I'm like Mr. Midwest.
Adam Rapp
I'm a member of the Academy, but I don't know who all the other Academy members are. It's not like a politician who knows who is in the Iowa caucus.
Albert Brooks
Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.
Alexander Chee
When I'm identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. 'Did you go to school for it?' someone asks. 'Yes,' I say. 'Where?' they ask, because I don't usually offer it. 'I went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' I say.
In 2007, I went straight from Tokyo to Iowa to join Hillary Clinton's traveling press. I felt like a foreigner there, too. I remember thinking, 'Americans are huge.'
Amy Chozick
I had been a foreign correspondent in Japan for the 'Wall Street Journal' when my editor there became Washington bureau chief - this was 2007 - and he said, 'How would you like to go to Iowa and cover Hillary Clinton?' I was 28. I went to Iowa.
I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.
Andrea Hirata
After finishing my undergraduate work at the University of Iowa, where I took creative writing classes taught by Writer's Workshop students, I applied to half a dozen MFA writing programs.
Andrew Shaffer
Iowa is especially critical for underdog and cash-strapped campaigns, because the caucus system relies on grassroots organizing, enabling candidates with time for retail politicking to beat better-funded rivals. So underdogs usually seize on the state.
Ari Melber
The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus is crucial for every presidential campaign.
Iowa has long been heralded as a bulwark against the money and media that dominate the modern presidential race. Its caucus requires voters in every precinct to actually gather in a room, at one time, and listen to neighbors pitch their chosen candidates, before they are allowed to vote.
I just finished 'Butter' for Weinstein, a comedy with this incredible cast - Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde, Alicia Silverstone - all-star cast and it was a fun set to be on. I've gotten really lucky to get all these down-to-earth cast members. 'Butter' is about butter carving in Iowa.
Ashley Greene
I'm from Iowa, we don't know what cool is!
Ashton Kutcher
I'm happy wherever I go, whatever I do. I'm happy in Iowa, I'm happy here in California.
The view of the Rocky Mountains from the Divide near Kiowa Creek is considered one of the finest in Colorado.
Bayard Taylor
So many things that I was excited about as a kid were about proximity. The idea that somebody could grow up in rural Iowa and be into break dancing because of YouTube - that was a really simple, profound idea.
Ben Silbermann
The USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, are level-four security clearance. Every nasty thing you can imagine is stored there. Ground zero for the apocalypse. And there's a day care right across the street.
Benjamin Percy
I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.
Bharati Mukherjee
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'
Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.
Bill Bryson
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.
I'd never been on a plane until I went to the Peach Bowl my freshman year at Iowa.
I love going back to cities where I had a strong fan base - like San Antonio, Minneapolis - those were really good fan bases, like Iowa and Chicago.
I have represented farmers in federal court during the Iowa farm crisis. A farmer from Butler County. I don't think Sen. Grassley had that life experience. It's just a simple difference of who we are and where we've come from.
By the time I land in Iowa, I feel like my mind is more open to the reality of being back home and focusing on the problems of the people in my district.
My debut upon the world's stage occurred on February 26, 1845, in the State of Iowa.
When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.
I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town.
I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.
The solid, middle-class values of hard work, responsibility, family, community, and faith my father talked about tirelessly from Iowa to New York, he lived at home. The hopes he had for his family and for me, he had for all Americans. I think Americans understood this.
It wouldn't do me much good to back somebody that won in Iowa if they can't carry on the campaign elsewhere.
I am from Des Moines, Iowa - not even the city but out in the country. I don't have a lot of trappings, I think, in my personality. I'm just a simple person with a silly bone.
I've still got the same friends that I grew up with, I still go to the same places that I used to go to when I was younger, and it's just a very special place to me. I'm still very proud to call Iowa home.
My grandmother from Iowa, she is dancing in Heaven at the prospect that the next president of the United States is going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The realities are, there are - you can be entertaining and you can be fun, and you can say things that actually appeal to people. You still have to figure out a way to get to 270 electoral votes. Get votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
I call myself Zimerican. I was born in the Midwest to Zimbabwean parents. My father was a professor at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Being from Iowa, I can tell you that Vegas is not normal.
I went to college in Iowa for a little bit and tried to get some bands together there. That was about a year of my life.
I first started reading about Barack and taking notes when he won the Iowa caucuses in January 2008 because I was embarrassed that, at that point, I knew virtually nothing about him.
The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D.
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games.
I write in an old-school paneled study in the middle of a large farmhouse in rural Iowa. I have pine floors, a big cherry desk, and a small window. The room is cluttered with papers and books and gifts from friends.
In some communities it is - like, for me, coming out with my parents, they were not accepting; they were not understanding. So it depends. For kids in New York and L.A., maybe it's different, but for kids in Iowa, for kids in Tennessee, it's still something that's not really talked about.
In 1988, as an unknown candidate, totally unknown, I won Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, won South Dakota. I was ahead in every Super Tuesday state the day after South Dakota. The only problem was I didn't have enough money. I had a million dollars left, and Al Gore had three and Michael Dukakis had three and it was lights out.
For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.
Iowa City is okay as Midwestern cities go, but there's no food, no culture, no ocean.
I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American.
Certainly I'm not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I'm a sponge. I've always been a sponge.
