Iowa Writers' Workshop

The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in 1936, is the original creative writing degree program and still the field's center of gravity: seventeen Pulitzer winners, six U.S. Poets Laureate, and a faculty history running from Robert Lowell and John Berryman to Marilynne Robinson. Its workshop model — the manuscript on the table, the author silent — became the international default, for better and worse.

The two-year MFA admits a small poetry cohort from thousands of applicants; funding has improved to near-full support. Its real product may be the network: American letters is substantially staffed by Iowa alumni, which is precisely what its critics hold against it.