General Catalog
Creative writing (iowa writers' workshop).
This is the first version of the 2024–25 General Catalog. Please check back regularly for changes. The final edition and the historical PDF will be published during the fall semester.
Graduate degree: MFA in English
Faculty: https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/faculty
Website: https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/
The Creative Writing Program (Iowa Writers' Workshop) is a world-renowned graduate program for fiction writers and poets. Founded in 1936, it was the first creative writing program in the United States to offer a degree, and it became a model for many contemporary writing programs. In addition to its Master of Fine Arts program, it also offers writing courses for undergraduates.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop has been home to thousands of remarkable writers, including Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Rita Dove, John Irving, James Alan McPherson, Philip Levine, Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham, Sandra Cisneros, Denis Johnson, Jorie Graham, Ann Patchett, Lan Samantha Chang, D.A. Powell, Nathan Englander, Yiyun Li, Eleanor Catton, Angela Flournoy, Garth Greenwell, Yaa Gyasi, and Jamel Brinkley. The program's faculty and alumni include winners of virtually every major literary award, including seventeen winners of the Pulitzer Prize, six recent U.S. Poets Laureate, and numerous winners of the National Book Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, and other major honors. In 2003, the Iowa Writers' Workshop received a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities—the first awarded to a university and only the second given to an institution rather than an individual.
The Creative Writing Program offers courses for students from other programs of study; summer courses are open to undergraduate and graduate students.
To learn more about the Creative Writing Program's history and faculty, visit the Iowa Writers' Workshop website.
Graduate Program of Study
- Master of Fine Arts in English
Creative Writing—Writers' Workshop Courses
The Creative Writing Program offers courses for undergraduates as well as graduate students. Enrollment in some graduate-level courses requires admission to the MFA program. See "Courses" in the Department of English section of the catalog for course descriptions and prerequisites to enrollment.
| Course # | Title | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Creative Writing for Non-Native English Speakers | 3 | |
| Creative Writing Studio Workshop | 3 | |
| Creative Writing | 3 | |
| Special Topics Workshop | 3 | |
| Fiction Writing | 3 | |
| Poetry Writing | 3 | |
| Writing and Reading Romance Fiction | 3 | |
| Writing and Reading Young Adult Fiction | 0,3 | |
| Writing and Reading Science Fiction | 3 | |
| Writing and Reading Fantasy Fiction | 3 | |
| Professional and Creative Business Communication | 3 | |
| Writing from Life | 3 | |
| Creative Writing for the Health Professions | 3 | |
| Creative Writing and Popular Culture | 3 | |
| Creative Writing for New Media | 3 | |
| Working Writers in Conversation | 3 | |
| Advanced Fiction Writing | 3 | |
| Advanced Poetry Writing | 3 | |
| The Sentence: Strategies for Writing | 3 | |
| Creative Writing for the Musician | 3 | |
| The Art of Revision: Rewriting Prose for Clarity and Impact | 3 | |
| Undergraduate Writers' Workshop: Fiction | arr. | |
| Undergraduate Writers' Workshop: Poetry | arr. | |
| Undergraduate Writers' Seminar | arr. | |
| Undergraduate Project in Creative Writing | arr. | |
| Novel Writing | 3 | |
| Form of Fiction | 3 | |
| Form of Poetry | 3 | |
| Seminar: Problems in Modern Fiction | arr. | |
| Seminar: Problems in Modern Poetry | arr. | |
| Fiction Workshop | arr. | |
| Poetry Workshop | arr. | |
| Special Topics Seminar | 3 | |
| Teaching Assistant Pedagogy Colloquium | 1-2 | |
| Graduate Project in Creative Writing | arr. | |
| MFA Thesis | arr. |
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Reading. Writing. Iowa.
Study at the Writing University in the heart of the nation's most celebrated literary town.
Immerse yourself in the world of literature, books, and creative writing–in a college and community obsessed with the written word.
Programs and Faculty
Build a Foundation
If you love reading and writing, you belong at Iowa. Declare the English or English and Creative Writing major, and join a community dedicated to exploring–and creating–great literature.
Expand Your Horizons
Develop your literary scholarship. Hone your creative writing. Delve into book studies. Harness the digital humanities. Prepare for success in the academy, public service, education, and the literary arts and professions.
Learn from Experts
Our faculty are creating the future of the English disciplines, inspired by our storied past. They advance scholarship and artistry in a welcoming academic community internationally recognized for literary excellence.
Top Public University for Writing
Iowa's strength in writing reaches new level in annual U.S. News & World Report ranking
News and Announcements
Professor Donika Kelly honored with Collegiate Teaching Award
Kaveh Akbar’s "Martyr!" on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List
English and Creative Writing alum wins Bronze at 2024 Summer Olympics
"Iowa City is the place to be– specifically the University of Iowa–if you want to be a writer and if you want to have access to incredible resources around writing. The reputation is insane." - Sydney Mayes, English and Creative Writing major
Upcoming Events
Book Matters: Louisa Hall and Bennett Sims in conversation with Donika Kelly
Ling Ma Reading and Q & A
Nonfiction Writing Program Alumni Reading Series: Tatiana Schlote-Bonne, author of Such Lovely Skin
The Last Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson in the American Century
NOTICE: The University of Iowa Center for Advancement is an operational name for the State University of Iowa Foundation, an independent, Iowa nonprofit corporation organized as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, publicly supported charitable entity working to advance the University of Iowa. Please review its full disclosure statement.
Writers' Workshop
Graduate program.
The MFA in Creative Writing
A studio program in poetry or fiction in a unesco city of literature, program overview.
The Program in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, known informally as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, offers a Master of Fine Arts degree in English, a terminal degree that qualifies graduates to teach creative writing at the college level.
While working toward their degree, graduate students will work with and learn from established poets and prose writers and make substantial progress in their creative projects.
The MFA program requires full-time residency in Iowa City, which offers students the chance to learn from one another and take advantage of the academic resources of our research university.
Twenty to twenty-five new students in each of the two genres come to Iowa City to join the program each year.
30 Pulitzer Prize winners
20 macarthur genius grant recipients, 19 national book award winners, 8 u.s. poets laureate, graduate courses.
Writers' Workshop courses, divided into workshops and seminars, comprise the core of the MFA degree curriculum. Taught by Writers' Workshop faculty, these classes are designed to help students develop their fiction and poetry while building a deeper understanding of the contemporary literary landscape and the many diverse literary traditions that might inform their work. Students often use these courses to start new creative projects or deepen and develop the projects they've already begun.
Workshops are the heart of the MFA degree and a defining element of our program. All Writers' Workshop graduate students take a workshop each semester with one of the program faculty. The workshop, a group of 8-12 writers, becomes each student's mini-cohort for the semester. Over the course of a semester, every student submits their creative work one or (often) more times to be read and discussed.
In addition to workshops, Writers' Workshop faculty offer seminars on a variety of literary topics. Seminars are designed specifically for writers and are intended to feed their creative work and process. Each seminar typically focuses on a specific topic relevant to writers honing their craft.
Other Courses
Graduate students may take classes outside of the department in any of many fields at the University of Iowa. These classes might be creative (screenwriting, bookmaking, translation) or scholarly (languages, history, literature). Students can also take advantage of professional seminars and training offered by the Graduate College.
Workshop Faculty
Visiting writers.
Every year the Writers' Workshop brings a number of distinguished writers to Iowa City to teach workshops and seminars. Recent visitors include Carmen Maria Machado, Tom Drury, Margaret Ross, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Garth Greenwell. The Visiting Writer program allows graduate students to build working relationships with established writers working in a variety of genres at different stages in their careers. These relationships are often meaningful to students as they progress through their literary careers after the Workshop.
Readings & Events
Throughout the semester, writers come to give readings, Q&As, and master classes in the Frank Conroy Reading Room. Recent visitors include Karen Russell, Ayad Akhtar, Arinze Ifeakandu, D.A. Powell, John Irving, and Sheila Heti.
The "After the Workshop" series offers students insight into publishing and career options. Every year, agents ask to visit the Workshop to meet with students.
Creative Community
While courses are the core of the Writers' Workshop experience, engaging with fellow students has proven just as key to our writers' growth. Iowa City provides an ideal environment for our community of about 100 writers to live, socialize, work on projects, and inspire one another. Writers' Workshop graduate students run several reading series in town, edit the Black Poetry Review , volunteer at community organizations, hang out in back yards and at local eating establishments, and provide for each other a support system, a sounding board, motivation, inspiration, and friendship.
The University of Iowa is also home to a range of creative disciplines, each of which offers additional opportunities for engagement. Writers' Workshop graduate students often take part in events with the International Writing Program, the Nonfiction Writing Program, the Spanish MFA Program, the Translation Program, and other creative disciplines. In recent years, graduate students have assembled a Workshop band, have sung in the University choir, auditioned for theater productions, and have taken part in various social organizations on campus.
Application Requirements
The development of the UI’s undergraduate creative writing major
The University of Iowa is already renowned for its prestigious graduate writing programs, whose alumni have gone on to win major literary awards, including 17 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, six U.S. Poets Laureate, and numerous winners of the National Book Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, and other significant honors. The new undergraduate degree in creative writing offered by the English department goes one step further in cementing the university’s distinction as “The Writing University,” a destination for writers from all over the world.
A collaboration between the Department of English and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the new English and Creative Writing major, which College Magazine ranked No. 1 for aspiring young writers, is as rigorous as it is inventive.
“Exploring and hearing the breadth of voices present in English literature has been such a fulfilling experience,” says undergraduate Austin Hughes. “Being able to read works from people I’ve never heard of before always feels like a source of artistic growth for me. The major has been a fantastic reminder of the versatility, weight, and the promise of written word, and I enjoy experiencing, again and again, that pleasant shock of a resonant voice I’ve never heard before.”
In the second year of its existence, the major has already seen a boom in enrollment. Over 500 undergraduates are now enrolled as English and Creative Writing majors. The major is also one of the most diverse in the university, with over 20 percent of students coming from minority or international backgrounds.
In the English department, it’s also important to us to give back to the community. Every semester, students in the Nonfiction Writing Program offer free creative writing workshops, which have become so popular that they fill up within a few days of being announced. Outreach efforts also include the unique Lloyd-Jones Residency for Versatile Writing, which has served three dozen high school students in rural Iowa since being founded last year. In all, the program estimates that it offers over 110 hours of free classes each year to more than 400 students—a major effort to nurture the literary community in Iowa and beyond.
“I hope our writers will graduate with an appetite for urgent innovation in their own work, met by an inspired sense of responsibility and belonging as emerging stewards of a fulfilling, inclusive literary community,” says Robyn Schiff, director of the undergraduate English and Creative Writing major. “We don’t inherit a literary community as writers,” explains Schiff, “we make our communities in a lifelong commitment that radiates far beyond the classroom.”
IMAGES
COMMENTS
The English and creative writing major introduces students to the wealth of resources associated with the University of Iowa and the Iowa City writing communities. For over 75 years, the Department of English and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop have been leaders in the area of writing.
Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing. Great readers make great writers—and great writers build fulfilling lives and successful careers. In the English and Creative Writing major, you'll explore literature in all its forms—and apply what you discover to your own expression.
English and Creative Writing majors learn to think, read, and write critically and creatively about how literature and language influence individuals and society.
The Creative Writing Program (Iowa Writers' Workshop) is a world-renowned graduate program for fiction writers and poets. Founded in 1936, it was the first creative writing program in the United States to offer a degree, and it became a model for many contemporary writing programs.
The MFA in English with a focus in Creative Writing is awarded by the Graduate College. The Creative Writing Program, also known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, also offers Nondegree Course Work. For the MFA in English with a focus in nonfiction writing, apply to the Nonfiction Writing Program.
The Undergraduate Creative Writing Major. The English Department houses the undergraduate major in English and Creative Writing, with a growing faculty that has counted multiple Writers' Workshop alumni among its ranks.
The English and Creative Writing major puts special emphasis on developing your artistry. Want to inspire young readers and writers? The English Education program, combined with either English major, will set you up to teach high school.
If you love reading and writing, you belong at Iowa. Declare the English or English and Creative Writing major, and join a community dedicated to exploring–and creating–great literature.
The Program in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, known informally as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, offers a Master of Fine Arts degree in English, a terminal degree that qualifies graduates to teach creative writing at the college level.
The new undergraduate degree in creative writing offered by the University of Iowa Department of English further cements Iowa's distinction as “The Writing University,” a destination for writers from all over the world.