In Iowa City, it is possible to walk into a bar on a Tuesday night and, from every booth, hear conversations about writing. As a member of this community, you’re likely to encounter a poet buying produce at the New Pioneer Co-op, and it’s entirely possible that the teaching assistant in your creative-writing course will someday become a famous author.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop — the first program in the country to offer an advanced degree in creative writing — remains the most exciting program in the country and an incubator of new literature. Its legacy of students and faculty include many current prize-winners, as well as writers for television and screen, and current U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Names of Workshop writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Rita Dove, and Kurt Vonnegut appear frequently on the syllabi of college literature classes all over the world, but in this town, you will find them engraved into bronze plates embedded in the city sidewalks.
As director of the Workshop, I am profoundly aware that the community of writers at Iowa would not be possible without the generosity of philanthropy.
Throughout the last 80 years, the Workshop and thousands of its students have been sustained in their creative work with the help of benefactors such as the Truman Capote Literary Trust, Glenn Schaeffer, and Marly and Laura Rydson. These generous donors have not themselves won literary prizes, but they provide strength, sustenance, and friendship to our program and its hardworking writers. Because their support is so important to us, you can find their names on the walls of the Workshop’s building and in the acknowledgments of countless books published by the graduates.
Philanthropy makes it possible for young writers to finish their first books, giving them precious time and support to create and revise their poetry and stories. Philanthropy built our library; it supports our professors and students. It funds the reading series that brings great poetry and fiction to the people of Iowa City. Philanthropy makes writing at Iowa possible.
Lan Samantha Chang
Director, Iowa Writers’ Workshop