How to Write the Personal Essay for MFA Applications
Use your essay to answer the question: Devoting two years to writing can be a dream come true, but why is it your dream?
Tags:
Format: In Print and Online
How to Mingle at a Book Thing
Find your social buoys, practice your talking points, and if all else fails, return to the topic of shoes.
Tags:
Looking for Love in a Time of Global Loneliness: A Profile of Kiran Desai
In her third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which comes out nearly twenty years after her Booker Prize–winning The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai considers loneliness in all its states of loss and heartache, possibility and promise, through the lens of a love story.
Tags:
Reimagining Place: Setting as Convergence
A novelist explores the craft of imagining a fictional setting based on a real-world location that holds a capacity for convergence, a place where many threads intersect and many stories are born.
Tags:
First Fiction 2025
Lauren Grodstein, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Jonathan Escoffery introduce five debut fiction authors: Sarah Yahm, Jon Hickey, Carrie R. Moore, Aaron John Curtis, and Jemimah Wei.
Tags:
The Gutting of the IWP
For decades, the International Writing Program in Iowa City facilitated transformative connections for its resident writers—but the loss of funding worth nearly a million dollars challenges staff and students to find ways to keep going.
Tags:
Q&A: Youn Leads Yale Younger Poets
Recently appointed judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Monica Youn speaks about the value of publishing a debut collection regardless of age, how form helps poems come alive, and what she looks for as she reads submissions.
Tags:
The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that creates unexpected connections, a story from the point of view of someone older than you, or a pair of lyrical essays that explore your personal responses to losses and gains.
Tags:
9,131 Sentences: How One Enormous Spreadsheet Taught Me to Be a Better Writer
Writing a book is a daunting challenge—but the texts we know and love can help. A nonfiction writer describes how a methodically organized spreadsheet of favorite quotes aided her journey from proposal to finished memoir.
Tags:
The Writer in the Machine: Agents’ Perspectives on AI
Artificial intelligence has irrevocably changed the paradigm of publishing. A journalist and editor speaks to agents about their thoughts on AI in a professional context, raising questions about contracts, rights, and the nature of art.
Tags:
Pages
