The Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City was the first creative writing degree program in a U.S. university. The workshop was made possible by the UI's decision early in the 20th century to grant academic thesis credit for creative work in the arts-another first in U.S. higher education. The Writers' Workshop has served as the blueprint for most of the other university-based creative writing programs, which have collectively transformed the terrain of American literary life.

The workshop originated in a creative writing seminar in the UI English Department. Iowa poet Paul Engle, became the first person to receive an advanced degree with a book of poems as a dissertation when he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the UI in the 1930s. He led the workshop to prominence, beginning in the early 1940s. At his memorial service several years ago, Engle was described as the most influential American writer of the 20th century because of the extent to which he changed the life of the writer in America.

The program has produced a dozen winners of the Pulitzer Prize (most recently Jorie Graham in poetry,1996), three of the last four US Poet Laureates (Mark Strand, Mona Van Duyn and Rita Dove), and numerous winners of the National Book Award and other major literary honors. A list of prominent graduates and faculty would be too long to reproduce. Noted graduates include: Flannery O'Connor, John Irving, Robert Bly, Tracy Kidder, Allan Gurganus, W.P. Kinsella, Wallace Stegner, William Stafford, Bharati Mukherjee, Raymond Carver, Jane Smiley, Thom Jones, Bob Shacochis, Margaret Walker, Andre Dubus, Phil Levine, Donald Justice, Ray Carver and T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Faculty luminaries have included: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Donald Justice, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Jose Donoso, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass.

The above text has been edited from a press release by Winston Barclay
Asst. Director, Arts Center Relations
The University of Iowa