Michener Center for Writers

The Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, endowed by James Michener's $20 million gift in the 1990s, runs the most generously funded MFA in the country: three fully funded years, a five-figure annual stipend with no teaching requirement, and dual-genre study. Admission rates run below 1 percent in fiction and not much higher in poetry.

Its poetry alumni and faculty orbit includes Roger Reeves and the late Dean Young, whose Austin tenure drew a generation of applicants. For a poet who wants funded time and a second genre — screenwriting, fiction — nothing else matches the terms.