The Program in Creative Writing is known informally as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and these two titles suggest the duality of our purpose and function. As a "program" we offer the Master of Fine Arts in English, a terminal degree qualifying the holder to teach creative writing at the college level. As a "workshop" we provide an opportunity for the talented writer to work and learn with established poets and prose writers. 

Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light. If one can "learn" to play the violin or to paint, one can "learn" to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well.

Accordingly, the fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us. We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.

View: Video of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival's Eleventh Hour lecture series panel, "The MFA at Any Age," featuring Lan Samantha Chang and alumni from the Iowa Writers' Workshop