The Low-Residency MFA: A Reassessment of an Underappreciated Program Model

Like many professors who teach in a low-residency MFA program, I often attempt to answer questions about creative writing programs from prospective and current grad students for which there is not much data. They’ve heard advice based on what was once common wisdom, like that the only reliable option for a serious writer is a fully funded, on-campus MFA program. But in today’s economy, moving to another location and living off a graduate-student stipend in hopes of landing one of the ever-scarcer creative writing professor jobs seems less and less appealing to many people. As Theo Gangi, director of the MFA program at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, has noticed, writers now often think in a more holistic way, “not just asking, ‘Do I get an MFA?’ but ‘How does this fit into everything else I’m doing?’”

Low-residency programs, like the one at Wilkes University, where I teach fiction and nonfiction, are designed to fit into the busy lives of graduate students. But these programs still carry the taint of another commonly held view—that they are inferior to residential MFAs. Even the language we use implies that: In most cases, “MFAs” are what we call on-campus programs, and “low-res” the adjective that signifies a difference. When I described residential programs as “traditional” in an e-mail while doing research for this article, Nomi Eve, director of the MFA program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, thoughtfully pushed back. “Isn’t fifty years long enough for a modality not to be considered atypical, untraditional, or alternative?” She’s right. 

There is a long and storied history of low-res programs. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop began in 1936 as the first graduate program in the country; one of its alumni, poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, launched the first low-residency MFA program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1976. By January 1981 the program had moved to Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, where it continues today. Fifty years after that first low-res program launched, what were once correspondence courses are now focused, adaptive programs offering the flexibility Gangi references. 

I conducted an in-depth look at the more than seventy-five low-res or hybrid MFA programs from which emerging writers can choose today. I sent questionnaires and interview requests to every program I could identify and received responses from directors, faculty, graduate students, and alumni from more than a third of them. (For the purposes of this article, I’ll use the term “low-res” to also include hybrid models, where students can choose whether to be in person or interact in real time via video-conferencing with mentors and peers; this analysis does not include asynchronous online programs.) I also profiled other mentoring programs that serve as complementary entryways or even alternatives for writers who cannot or do not want to attend MFA programs. I offered the people I interviewed the chance to speak off the record in order to have candid conversations, not glossy-pamphlet highlights. The result was a focused, frank overview of what writing mentorship looks like today. 

Far from being lesser than residential MFAs, these programs deserve to be centered in any discussion about the future of writing instruction because they are innovative, nimble, generative, and often economically sustainable—for universities and, in turn, for their students—in unstable times.

In the dozens of conversations I conducted, I heard many program directors mention students’ worry that not attending an on-the-ground program would mean missing out on a close-knit writing community. Everyone I spoke with felt the opposite was true: Directors across the country said that community is at the heart of their low-res programs. Meg Kearney at Lassell University’s Solstice MFA in Newton, Massachusetts, praised the program’s “lifelong community” that is “supportive, inclusive, and kind.” Kevin Clouther at the Omaha Writer’s Workshop noted that nine days at Lied Lodge in a wooded area outside of Nebraska City creates a “mutually supportive environment.” For Lee Clay Johnson at the Brooklyn Writers Foundry, spending time together in New York City, “the literary hub of the world,” is a draw for many writers who are looking for “structured community” where they can “take each other seriously.” Mischa Willett at Whitworth Writers’ Workshop in Spokane, Washington, wondered why the community at low-residency programs was so much richer than on-campus MFAs: “Is it something about living together for a week at a time? That students have time to miss each other in between residencies?”

The answer to his question might be that low-res programs offer what Rosanne Welch, executive director at the Stephens College MFA program in Columbia, Missouri, calls an “educational vacation.” The in-person portion of these programs gives students a chance to find their people and take a break from hectic lives to focus on their craft with other dedicated artists. Usually these in-person intensives follow the model Voigt and others began at Goddard, gathering twice a year for seven to ten days in early winter and summer with semester-long mentorships or virtual workshops in between.

This model suits at least five groups that faculty mentors identified. The first group are caregivers, usually (but not only) parents, who can manage to get away from their lives for a week at a time but can’t viably move to a new place for a graduate degree. Another group are midcareer and older professionals at a point in their lives when they can pay for a degree and are eager for focused feedback, mentorship, and deadlines. A third group are teachers, librarians, and other professionals for whom a master’s degree can help them move up a pay level and who can fit the flexible schedule around full-time jobs they don’t plan to leave. With the way low-res programs have embraced technology after the COVID lockdown, a fourth group are Gen Z students comfortable with online and hybrid learning. And, finally, these programs often work well for students who face obstacles to everyday classroom learning for reasons of disabilities, mental health, or other life circumstances. 

There are certainly students who do not fit into any of these groups, and the mix of writers in some programs results in friendships that cross cultural boundaries. Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, MFA program chair at Antioch University in Los Angeles sees multiple kinds of diversity at a program with students who are 40 percent people of color and include “a lot of parents” plus many “working-class people, a lot of first-generation people, neurodivergent people, veterans, and a huge queer population” that she says represent “true class diversity, which I think basically doesn’t exist in most academic settings.” The age diversity of students is especially attractive to administrators worried about the demographic cliff facing higher ed today.

Some low-res MFAs can also offer a specific type of supportive community. Deborah Taffa, the director of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program in Santa Fe and the author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024), was the first Kwatsaan (Yuma) writer to publish about her culture. Taffa has found that writers from Indigenous communities who attend primarily non-Native MFA programs often work with mentors who do not fully understand the ethical ramifications and mental health aspects of “knowing that the less often your people have been portrayed in the media in a way that feels accurate, the more the burden is on your work to be representative in a way that feels honest and true.” While all writers are welcome at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the program emphasizes the importance of providing space for Indigenous writers to think about their work from every angle and develop a writing craft that has an almost sacramental aspect to it—one that requires a singular kind of community to help bear that representational weight. 

No matter their focus, the faculty, students, and alumni I talked to who could describe their programs as sustainable and thriving touted community as their highest strength.

This has not always been the case. Off the record, several people said that between the early 1990s and the late 2010s, there was a proliferation of hastily built “cash cow” low-res programs billed to college administrators as a quick way to make a buck for the university. Tod Goldberg, director of the MFA program at the University of California in Riverside, suggested that many small private colleges built programs designed to profit off of artists’ student loans, which he qualified as “just gross.” Following a rapid proliferation of low-res programs, Goldberg identified a “massive contraction” when colleges realized there were limitations both on interested students and faculty willing to work for adjunct pay. Goldberg is proud that UC Riverside, as a public university, is able to “pay our professors what they’re worth, that they get benefits, and pensions, and security.” 

Other directors who preferred to remain off the record did not share Goldberg’s sense that their programs pay their adjunct professors what they’re worth. Many low-res programs work with adjunct and contingent faculty compensated only with course releases—that is, a reduced teaching load but no additional financial compensation. These temporary contracts are susceptible to budget pressures, which directors touted as one of the reasons that low-res programs appeal to some administrators who see them as a place where cuts can easily be made. But what might be good for administrators is not always good for their faculty, to say nothing of students. 

This, combined with an overall decline in tenure-track jobs and systemic cuts in funding across all university systems, makes balancing faculty needs and program needs tricky. R Dean Johnson, who directs the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, spoke to the “high-wire” act of an MFA director running a financially sustainable program. Though the faculty members in his program earn more than many other adjuncts, he worries that universities too often focus on cost savings rather than retaining core labor: “[Losing] institutional knowledge and consistency of core faculty are the price they’re willing to pay so they don’t have to lay out as much in salaries and benefits.” Johnson was one of many who argued that the larger MFA community must be better at “protecting the rights and careers of our fellow writers and educators.” Nevertheless, at his own university, Johnson feels lucky to have a department chair and deans who have been proactive in supporting the program, so that they can be sustainable even in the midst of a precarious time in academia and the humanities: Since COVID, and as the national political culture has grown more and more hostile to the arts, financial realities have led a number of MFA programs to close completely.

There are many factors outside the control of those involved in MFA programs that can factor into a program’s sustainability. At the top of many directors’ list of concerns is the end of the federal Grad PLUS student loan program, which was established in 2006 to allow graduate and professional students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance after they reached the limits of the Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan Program. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the Grad PLUS program for students applying for new loans after July 1, 2026, and the implications for many graduate programs are uncertain. Additional factors include the size of a school’s endowment; the vagaries in publishing; decreased national artistic grants; the price of fuel for programs that rely on travel; the lack of jobs in the humanities—the list goes on. And setting realistic expectations with administrators, faculty, and students about what success in these programs looks like—it might be writers becoming better at their craft, rather than switching careers or getting a book deal—is certainly easier in some contexts than others. 

While several people praised their institutions, many others did not, often providing scathing off-the-record accounts of administrators’ lack of support. Key complaints included a hostile attitude towards the humanities in general as the priorities of some administrations increasingly shift towards business and STEM. Some administrators siphon off MFA programs’ revenue to use in other places across the university, then cap the programs’ budgets and curtail their ability to recruit faculty and students. Many administrators refuse to innovate and adjust the way a practitioner’s degree needs to evolve in order to prepare writers for an ever-changing publishing market. The gap between the kind of support faculty and directors think an MFA program needs and what they can convince their administration to provide is often wide and difficult to breach. 

Gary Dop, the MFA director at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, who has also served as his college’s dean of innovation and started similar kinds of programs, notes that at many institutions the artists in the program and the administration who want to keep the lights on do not have a strong sense of shared purpose. He lays out a series of necessary questions colleges and universities should be asking: “Is it fiscally responsible for an institution to start this kind of program? What is the cost of this program? What does it bring? How does it help our institution in general to function? Will this help support other things that we care about in the institution?” In his years of experience he finds that institutions who grapple with these questions are likelier to succeed.

The definition of this success is one that is crucial for writers, mentors, directors, and administrators to articulate and understand. Some programs have high metrics for professional achievement. At UC Riverside, faculty members are proud of the publication records of their graduates; Goldberg says 75 percent of alums publish (or have their work optioned or produced, in the case of screenwriting students) within two years of graduation. However, other representatives of programs I spoke with did not place the same emphasis on professional accomplishments. Sarah Shotland, who is an assistant professor in creative writing at Carlow University in Pittsburgh and director of the Madwomen in the Attic program, says one advantage of low-res MFAs is their capacity to educate writers who need not immediately make a living off their work: “Since many students come from professional settings, graduates are not entering a job market they are not going to succeed in, because they aren’t entering the job market. They already have a career.” For Shotland this programming structure can “eliminate that question of the ethical promise of an MFA.” Jennifer Militello, the director of the MFA program at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, says we as a literary culture often have “the wrong conversation” about the value of an MFA. As Militello says, “No one is asking, what does an MFA give that no one can put a price tag on? And yet that is what my students and faculty are talking about all the time.” At a time of rapid technological advances, when AI generates writing that sounds more and more the same, Militello’s sense of the intangible value of what an MFA offers feels surprisingly fresh and relevant: It can put us “in touch with our humanity” and let us ask “questions about the world and what it means to be alive.” Many of the people I spoke with said that, far from taking the place of writers, the AI boom will only make us hungrier for real, human-centered art, and MFA programs prepare writers now for the work that will only be more in demand in the future.

An MFA program’s focus on craft is often more intense in a program built around one-on-one mentoring, as most low-res programs are. Naseem Jamnia, who teaches in the low-res program at the University of Nevada in Reno at Lake Tahoe, finds the rigor of discussion of the writer’s art to be more robust at low-res programs than elsewhere. “I’ve never heard anyone argue that low-residencies are actually better for your writing growth than full-residencies, so let me be the first to argue that,” says Jamnia. When growth as an artist comes first, the possibilities of publishing follow. Taffa at IAIA says its program embraces the slow process of writing: “I think a lot of people rush to the finish line quickly because they are so concerned about the impression that they’re making, and I don’t know that there’s room for that in an artist’s life. You have to separate your public persona from the craft of doing the work.” She teaches writers to take the time they need to “bow to the language” and ask, “Is this good enough yet?” then to write and rewrite and rewrite “until you know that there’s nothing else that you can do with it.” That process might take years, often beginning before and extending past the MFA timeline—which opens the door to other mentoring and community-building programs.

With the adjective “low-res” setting them apart, these programs have often been seen as alternatives to MFA programs. But the truth is that low-res programs are MFA programs. And they deserve to be valued at the same level as their residential counterparts. 

However, excellent options for a writers’ education also exist outside degree-granting programs. For some writers, especially those who face insurmountable obstacles to getting an MFA, these programs can provide some of the community they’re seeking in an often-isolated vocation and serve as alternatives to MFAs. They can also complement and supplement an MFA experience for those who are interested in the degree but not ready to commit to years of intense writing and expensive tuition; those who have had difficult experiences in MFA programs that harmed or frustrated them; or for those who, as Taffa suggests, are still writing and revising long after their time in an MFA program is over. Three of these kinds of programs demonstrate the types of unique mentorship opportunities available to emerging writers. 

The Periplus collective is an all-volunteer mentor program designed for writers of color living in the United States. Each year the collective accepts a cohort of fellows who are paired with an established mentor for a year of monthly meetings to support their writing practice. The group began when Vauhini Vara, R. O. Kwon, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Rachel Khong brainstormed in 2020 about a free one-year mentorship for emerging writers of color. In the past five years, the program has grown extensively: In 2026 they received five hundred applications for fewer than forty fellowships. Audrey Kuo, who was a fellow and now serves as the accessibility director and a member of the advisory committee, sought out the program as an alternative to the MFA. “Because of disabilities and my community organizing commitments and my work, I would not be able to pursue a full-time MFA,” Kuo says. Instead, Periplus and the Changemakers Authors Cohort (a support community for writers working on issues of social justice), became the “two backbones of a self-guided MFA.” Libby Flores, a Periplus mentor who is on the program’s advisory committee, frames Periplus as “an entryway space” where writers can access resources including mentorship, craft talks, and discussions about the practicalities of publishing, as well as in-depth conversations processing the ways in which many writers of color encounter a lack of safety in unsupportive spaces. Flores does not view the program as a replacement for an MFA but rather an opportunity to “remove the gatekeeping about the publishing world.” Though mentors are still being added, it’s clear the program is at the edge of what is sustainable for its all-volunteer collective, even as the rising number of applications for fellowships indicates that demand for what Periplus offers is high. The good thing is that it’s an idea that’s eminently replicable: Kuo thinks “other writers taking our model” and starting their own collective would be “amazing.” 

One of the original mentors of Periplus, R. O. Kwon launched a new initiative with Fatimah Asghar and Ingrid Rojas Contreras (another Periplus mentor) in December 2025 called the Ministry of Words. The three mentors each offer one four-month-long class; it costs $3,917 to take one class, and a discount is given if you take more than one. Demand has been strong; their classes of ten to twelve students fill up quickly. Mentees meet every other week with their faculty: Kwon for fiction, Rojas Contreras for nonfiction, and Asghar for poetry and screenwriting. In the spring the classes are generative, and in the fall they are workshop-based. The three mentors also offer cross-disciplinary lectures, shared online writing spaces, and a growing number of community opportunities. Rojas Contreras says that all three of the mentors are interested in “holding space for up-and-coming artists,” but that the Ministry of Words is not intended as an alternative to an MFA. (Both she and Kwon are visiting writers at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and have taught in a number of MFA and writing programs.) Instead she views this as one of the “third spaces or alternative spaces” that they can create for a group of people “who are rooted in the place [they’re] in” and can’t move for a program. Asghar values the fact that all three mentors share rigorous interest in the art of teaching and that this shared program allows them to think deeply about what teaching looks when it’s not shaped by the strict confines of academia and instead can bring in practices that are “a bit more ancestral.” One of Kwon’s goals in the Ministry of Words (and all of her teaching) is to “share resources, share knowledge, share your application, share the abundance, and create more abundance by doing so.” The three speak together seamlessly about what that looks like: Kwon’s desire to pass along knowledge to others is drawn from their shared experience as “writers of color, with immigrant backgrounds—there was so much I didn’t know when I was starting out.” Rojas Contreras describes the Ministry of Words culture as one of “immigrant hustle—like, ‘Oh, I figured out how this works, let me explain it to you.’” “What I really love about our approach is that it makes room for everybody, and it makes room for success to be defined by everybody, versus being defined by an institution,” Asghar adds.

Periplus and Ministry of Words and other programs like them work outside of institutions in ways that are entryways into, alternatives of, or complementary to academia. But an innovative partnership between the low-res MFA at Carlow University and Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops pairs these two concepts in a symbiotic relationship that benefits both. Madwomen in the Attic was begun in 1979 by a small group of women interested in Tillie Olsen’s writing about class issues who sought to create a community for diverse women writers in Pittsburgh. Madwomen is an auxiliary enterprise of Carlow University, which functions as its fiscal sponsor, but offers community classes to women writers from their late teens to their nineties in Pittsburgh for a reduced cost of $250 per semester. Carlow gives a full semester of credit to any writer who takes three classes at Carlow, which MFA director Tess Barry says amounts to a $9,000 scholarship, allowing writers to try out workshops before committing to the MFA program. Director Sarah Shotland sees the fact that many of the writers who attend Madwomen in the Attic workshops have established careers “doesn’t mean that they aren’t serious about writing: It means that they bring the seriousness with which they have applied to their previous career to the craft of writing.” They recognize that their “skill doesn’t match their taste,” and they want to “work with real professionals who can bridge that gap.” The programs provide a two-handed approach: Madwomen stands alone, providing space for the writing community in Pittsburgh, and many writers begin and end their educational journey there. But for those who want more, their partnership with Carlow allows the Madwomen to move more deeply into the writing world. If they decide to pursue the MFA, students in Carlow’s program can attend either a residency in Pittsburgh or one with Irish mentors at a residency at Trinity College in Dublin. Barry is herself a Madwoman, and though the program draws students from all over the world, she touts quality of the instruction in the community program and in the low-res program for the “caliber of the writing” and the lifelong connections: “Most people who become Madwomen remain Madwomen.”

At a time of political, economic, and institutional precariousness, it can be easy to focus on the negatives facing today’s emerging writers. But it’s long past time those of us invested in the future of craft-focused, disciplinarily rigorous, artistically inventive, career-minded writing education give these programs the respect that they are due. They are not without obstacles and issues, and many are much healthier than others. Yet in an age when we are hungrier than ever for experiences that define our humanity, low-res programs draw us into community with others and allow us to think deeply about the art of writing, and the innovative mentoring initiatives that complement them present unique opportunities. Fifty years ago when Ellen Bryant Voigt and a plucky faculty at Goddard College began a program designed for writers with experience and rooted lives, they could not have foreseen what they were beginning: These nimble programs might just be the future of writing education.  

Jessica Goudeau is a journalist and the author of We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration (Viking, 2024), and After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America (Viking, 2020). Under the not-so-secret pseudonym “Jess Cannon,” she wrote A Zoom With a View (Dutton, 2026), the first book in a mystery series about a failed academic turned amateur sleuth. She teaches creative nonfiction in the Maslow Family Graduate Program of Creative Writing at Wilkes University.