Iowa Writers' Workshop

Based on Wikipedia: Iowa Writers' Workshop

The Factory That Makes American Writers

Somewhere in Iowa City, Iowa, there's a building where an extraordinary number of America's most celebrated writers learned their craft. The acceptance rate hovers between 2.7 and 3.7 percent—roughly the same odds as getting into Harvard, except instead of future lawyers and bankers, the selection committee is hunting for people who might write the next great American novel.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop is not merely old. At ninety years, it is the original—the first creative writing program in the country to offer a Master of Fine Arts degree. Every MFA program that came after, from Stanford to Columbia to the hundreds of programs now scattered across universities everywhere, traces its lineage back to this corn-belt institution that somehow became the center of American literary ambition.

The numbers are staggering. Seventeen Pulitzer Prizes in fiction. Eighteen in poetry. Seven Poet Laureates of the United States. A Man Booker Prize winner. Two MacArthur "genius grant" recipients. The program has produced not just writers but the people who run the literary world: editors at major publishing houses, founders of independent presses, directors of other MFA programs, curators of cultural institutions.

How did a public university in the middle of nowhere become a literary empire?

The Radical Idea

The story begins in 1897, when a theater producer named George Cram Cook started teaching a class called "Verse-Making" at the University of Iowa. This was peculiar. At the time, universities studied literature—they did not make it. The idea that creative writing could be taught alongside chemistry and history struck many academics as absurd. Writing was art, and art came from inspiration, not instruction.

But Iowa kept pushing. In 1922, Dean Carl Seashore made a decision that would reshape American literature: he allowed students to submit creative work as their graduate theses. A novel could count the same as a scholarly dissertation. A collection of poems could earn you a master's degree.

This was heresy. The academy was built on analysis, on criticism, on studying what others had written. The notion that a student's own stories deserved the same weight as research seemed to collapse the distinction between studying art and making it.

The formal program launched in 1936, but it was the second director who turned a quirky experiment into a national institution.

Paul Engle's Machine

Paul Engle ran the Workshop from 1941 to 1965, and during those twenty-four years he essentially invented the modern MFA program. Engle understood something crucial: talent needed support, and support required money. So he did something no other creative writing teacher had done. He became a fundraiser.

Engle courted corporate America with missionary zeal. Maytag, the appliance company headquartered in nearby Newton, Iowa, wrote checks. So did Quaker Oats. So did U.S. Steel and Reader's Digest. The Rockefeller Foundation donated forty thousand dollars between 1953 and 1956—real money in an era when a year's tuition might cost a few hundred dollars.

He cultivated media moguls. Henry Luce, who founded Time and Life magazines, provided publicity. Gardner Cowles Jr., publisher of Look magazine, did the same. In 1959, Engle partnered with Esquire for a symposium titled "The Writer in Mass Culture" that brought Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and Mark Harris to Iowa City. Newsweek covered the event. Suddenly, Iowa wasn't just a writing program. It was news.

Engle also expanded the program's scope. He divided it into separate fiction and poetry tracks, each with its own faculty and philosophy. With his wife, Hualing Nieh Engle, he started the country's first translation workshop in 1962, then founded the International Writing Program in 1967, bringing authors from around the world to Iowa City. The couple's work facilitating creative exchange across Cold War boundaries earned them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1976, supported by over three hundred writers.

They didn't win. But the nomination itself signaled how far the program had traveled from its origins as a peculiar academic experiment.

The Workshop Model

What actually happens inside the Iowa Writers' Workshop? The answer created a template that creative writing programs worldwide would copy.

The core is the workshop itself—a three-hour weekly seminar where students gather around a table to discuss each other's work. Before class, a few students submit stories or poems. Everyone else reads and annotates. Then, in class, the author sits silent while their peers take apart what they've written.

This is more brutal than it sounds. The author cannot defend their work, cannot explain their intentions, cannot argue. They can only listen as a dozen readers describe what works, what fails, and what confuses them. The process, by design, creates pressure. Students must learn to separate their ego from their prose, to hear criticism without collapsing, to think analytically about choices that might have felt instinctive.

The founders built this system deliberately. Norman Foerster, who championed creative writing at Iowa, believed in the academic legitimacy of the craft. Wilbur Schramm, the first director, insisted that writing should be as technical and rigorous as studying literature. They rejected the romantic notion that artists needed to be "unleashed." Instead, they wanted to focus and refine them.

Frank Conroy, who directed the program from 1987 to 2005—the longest tenure at the time—described the philosophy when the Workshop received the National Humanities Medal in 2002:

It is a focused program, like Juilliard. We read constantly, rereading the classics. They can write anything they want. We teach them what we've learned as writers.

The comparison to Juilliard is telling. The Workshop sees writing not as self-expression but as performance, something that can be practiced, critiqued, and improved through disciplined repetition.

What They're Looking For

Lan Samantha Chang became the sixth director in 2006. She is the program's first woman, first Asian American, and first person of color to hold the position. Under her leadership, the endowment has grown from $2.6 million to $12.5 million.

In a 2022 interview, she explained what the admission committee seeks:

We don't have a quota about where people are from or what kind of writing they do. What we look for is work that is filled with energy, work that interests us. I'm sure, every year, there are many, many very good writers who go elsewhere because we don't admit them. But we try to be very open. I would say that we look for work that excites us. Frank Conroy used to describe it as feeling someone reaching off the page at you when you're reading, feeling tension in the language.

That phrase—"someone reaching off the page at you"—captures something essential about the Workshop's aesthetic. They're not looking for technical perfection or adherence to any particular style. They're looking for life, for urgency, for the sense that the writer had no choice but to put these particular words in this particular order.

The Faculty Roster

Part of the Workshop's mystique comes from who teaches there. The program has employed an almost absurd concentration of literary talent.

Kurt Vonnegut taught at Iowa. So did John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Marilynne Robinson. Richard Yates, whose novel Revolutionary Road influenced generations of writers exploring suburban despair, served on the faculty. Robert Lowell and John Berryman, two of the most important poets of the twentieth century, both taught workshops there.

The current faculty includes Jamel Brinkley, whose story collection A Lucky Man won the Ernest J. Gaines Award; Charles D'Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish Museum; and Ethan Canin, whose novels include America America. The poetry side includes Mark Levine, Tracie Morris, Margaret Ross, and Elizabeth Willis.

Visiting faculty rotate through—Carmen Maria Machado, whose Her Body and Other Parties blurs horror with literary fiction; Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had; Tom Drury, whose deadpan Iowa novels have earned comparison to early Coen Brothers films.

What's remarkable is not just the individual names but the density. For two years, students work alongside writers whose books they might have studied in college courses. They receive criticism from people who have faced the same blank page and solved the same problems.

The Pulitzer Lineage

The Workshop's Pulitzer Prize haul reads like a syllabus for American literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

In fiction: Robert Penn Warren won in 1947 for All the King's Men, a novel about Louisiana political corruption that remains a landmark of American political fiction. Wallace Stegner won in 1972 for Angle of Repose, his exploration of a marriage against the backdrop of the American West—Stegner earned his master's and doctorate at Iowa before founding Stanford's creative writing program. Jane Smiley won in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, her King Lear retelling set on an Iowa farm. Michael Cunningham won in 1999 for The Hours, which weaves together Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with contemporary storylines. Marilynne Robinson won in 2005 for Gilead, a novel written as a dying father's letter to his young son.

The poetry list is even longer. W.D. Snodgrass won in 1960 for Heart's Needle, poems about his divorce that helped launch the confessional poetry movement. Rita Dove won in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah and later became Poet Laureate—the youngest person and first African American to hold that position. Jorie Graham won in 1996; she also taught at Iowa. Philip Levine, who earned his MFA there in 1957 and returned to teach, won in 1995.

The list continues through decades: Philip Schultz in 2008, Paul Harding in 2010, Andrew Sean Greer in 2018, Jayne Anne Phillips in 2024. The Workshop has won so many Pulitzers that tracking them requires a spreadsheet.

The Nonfiction Turn

Though designed for fiction writers, the Workshop began accepting nonfiction theses in the 1970s. This shift reflected broader changes in American letters. Creative nonfiction—a term that barely existed before the 1960s—was becoming a distinct literary form, blending the techniques of fiction with the material of journalism.

Tracy Kidder graduated in 1974 and won the Pulitzer in 1982 for The Soul of a New Machine, his account of engineers building a new computer at Data General. The book essentially invented a genre: literary journalism about technology, told with the pacing of a novel.

The Workshop's nonfiction graduates went on to shape how Americans understand creative nonfiction as a category. They became literary journalists, memoirists, essayists who brought the Workshop's analytical rigor to writing that started from fact rather than imagination.

The Network Effect

Perhaps the Workshop's most significant legacy is not the prizes but the pipeline. Graduates have gone on to direct creative writing programs across the country, spreading the Iowa model like franchise owners opening new locations.

Wallace Stegner founded Stanford's program, which became Iowa's chief rival. Eileen Pollack directed the University of Michigan's program. Bret Anthony Johnston leads the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Adam Haslett runs Hunter College's MFA. Each of these programs, in turn, produces graduates who go on to teach elsewhere.

The publishing industry shows the same pattern. Haki R. Madhubuti founded Third World Press, one of the country's most important Black-owned publishers. Jill Bialosky serves as executive editor and vice president at W.W. Norton. Thomas Gebremedhin is vice president and executive editor at Doubleday. The editors who decide which books get published often learned to read manuscripts at Iowa.

This network creates a kind of literary ecosystem. A writer might study under a Workshop graduate, publish with a Workshop alumnus editor, then get reviewed by critics trained in the same aesthetic tradition. The Workshop didn't just produce writers. It produced the infrastructure that publishes, promotes, and evaluates American literature.

The Physical Space

The Workshop has moved three times. It started in temporary military barracks near the Iowa River—the kind of prefabricated buildings that universities threw up after World War II to handle the influx of GI Bill students. The image is striking: some of America's most celebrated writers launching their careers in what were essentially army surplus huts.

In 1966, the program moved to the English-Philosophy Building, a brutalist structure typical of 1960s campus architecture. Then, in 1997, it found what may be its permanent home: Dey House, a more graceful building that received the Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives extension in 2006.

The physical space matters because so much of the Workshop's pedagogy depends on proximity. Students don't just attend class together. They live in the same small city, drink at the same bars, date each other, argue about books at the same coffee shops. Iowa City is small enough that the community becomes inescapable. For two years, students are immersed in a culture where writing is the primary concern, where everyone they know is wrestling with the same problems of craft.

The Criticism

Not everyone loves the Workshop model. Critics argue that it produces a certain kind of polished, careful fiction—well-crafted but safe, technically proficient but emotionally muted. The phrase "workshop story" has become a pejorative, describing prose that has been sanded smooth by too many rounds of peer criticism.

Others point to the program's role in professionalizing creative writing. Before Iowa, novelists supported themselves through journalism, teaching, or ordinary jobs. The MFA path created a new career track: writing program to prestigious publication to teaching position at another writing program. Some argue this insularity has narrowed American fiction, pulling it away from broader popular audiences and toward an increasingly specialized literary culture.

Eric Bennett's book Workshops of Empire examined the program's Cold War connections, arguing that funding from organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation shaped the Workshop's aesthetic preferences in ways that aligned with American cultural diplomacy. The program's emphasis on individual craft over political engagement, Bennett suggested, reflected broader ideological projects.

These criticisms have merit. But they also testify to the Workshop's influence. You don't write books examining an institution's hidden impact unless that institution actually matters.

The Cultural Footprint

In a sign of how deeply the Workshop has penetrated American culture, it appeared as a plot point on the HBO series Girls. The character Hannah Horvath, an aspiring writer in Brooklyn, enrolls in the program—a storyline that assumed audiences would recognize what getting into Iowa meant.

The New York Times, celebrating the program's fiftieth anniversary in 1986, called it "something of a dowager, standing unshakably in the mainstream of our literary life." Forty years later, that description still holds. The Workshop remains the most prestigious creative writing program in the country, the place ambitious writers most want to go, the credential most likely to open doors in the literary world.

What Happens After

The Workshop's official curriculum is modest. Students take a small number of classes each semester—the graduate workshop itself plus one or two literature seminars. The program explicitly prepares students for "the realities of professional writing, where self-discipline is paramount." No one tells you when to write. No one assigns deadlines except the workshop submission schedule.

This freedom is intentional. The program assumes its students have already demonstrated they can write. What they need is time, feedback, and the community of peers who understand what they're trying to do. The MFA is not vocational training. It's two years of protected time to develop.

What comes after varies wildly. Some graduates publish quickly and build literary careers. Others spend decades working on books that may or may not find publishers. Some leave writing entirely, applying the analytical skills they developed to other fields. The MFA guarantees nothing except the education itself.

But the network endures. Decades after graduation, Workshop alumni recognize each other, publish each other, blurb each other's books. The program creates not just writers but a community that persists across careers and generations.

The Ongoing Experiment

The Iowa Writers' Workshop began as a strange idea: that creative writing could be taught like any other academic subject, that universities had something to offer artists beyond libraries and lecture halls. Ninety years later, the idea no longer seems strange. MFA programs have proliferated across the country. Creative writing has become one of the most popular majors at many universities.

Whether this is good for American literature remains debatable. But the Workshop's influence is not. It created the model that others followed, trained the teachers who spread that model elsewhere, and produced a disproportionate share of the writers whose books define contemporary American fiction and poetry.

Somewhere in Iowa City, students are still gathering around seminar tables, still reading each other's work, still sitting in silence while their peers explain what's wrong with their sentences. The process is the same one Wilbur Schramm and Norman Foerster imagined in the 1930s: rigorous, technical, analytical, designed not to unleash artists but to refine them.

The acceptance rate stays brutal. The competition for spots grows fiercer each year. And the graduates keep winning prizes, keep running publishing houses, keep directing programs at other universities. The factory that makes American writers shows no signs of slowing down.