Iowa Writers' Workshop

The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. The workshop's current director is the writer Lan Samantha Chang. History In 1897, theater producer George Cram Cook began teaching a class called "Verse-Making", effectively the University of Iowa's first creating writing class. In 1922, Dean Carl Seashore of the University of Iowa Graduate College allowed creative writing to be accepted as theses for advanced degrees. Later, the School of Letters began selecting students for writing courses in which they were tutored by resident and visiting writers. The Iowa Writers' Workshop began as an official program in 1936, with Wilbur Schramm as its first director. Under Paul Engle, its second director from 1941 to 1965, the program became a national landmark and was divided into fiction and poetry. He partnered with Esquire for a 1959 symposium titled "The Writer in Mass Culture" that included as guests Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and Mark Harris, and was covered in Newsweek. In 1962, Engle and his wife, Hualing Nieh Engle, started the country's first translation workshop, which led to the creation of the university's MFA program in literary translation. In 1967, the couple founded the International Writing Program, and in 1976, they were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for their work facilitating creative and cultural exchange through the International Writing Program. A reported over 300 writers supported them for the honor, which the Nobel Committee eventually did not give that year.