About AWP: The Growth of
Creative Writing Programs

A Brief History of AWP by David Fenza, Executive Director

The mission of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs is to foster literary achievement, to advance the art of writing as essential to a good education, and to serve the makers, teachers, students, and readers of contemporary writing.

More than any other literary organization, AWP has helped North America to develop a literature as diverse as the continent’s peoples. This, of course, is also a boast for the democratic virtues of higher education in North America and the many public universities that comprise AWP. AWP’s members have provided literary education to students and aspiring writers from all backgrounds, economic classes, races, and ethnic origins.

AWP has helped to establish the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen. AWP has supported the development of hundreds of educational programs, conferences, reading series, and literary magazines as well as thousands of jobs for writers and new audiences for contemporary literature. Academic programs have mustered hundreds of millions of dollars to support the study, making, and enjoyment of literature.

Because AWP has been so successful, many of us take it for granted that writing workshops and literary readings are now a part of the study and enjoyment of literature. It's amusing to recall what oddities AWP and its original members were four decades ago. On most campuses, the best, most respected writers were those long dead and safely entombed in anthologies and libraries. Contemporary writers were regarded as being too simple, too intuitive, or too peculiar in their methods to preserve the rigors of literature as a discipline. “We study literature today,” Allen Tate remarked, “as if nobody ever again intended to write any more of it. The official academic point of view is that all the literature has been written, and is now a branch of history.”

AWP rescued literature from the exhumations of philologists to elevate literature’s status as a living art, an art that compels each new generation to add its own interpretations, readings, stories, and poems.

AWP was founded in 1967 to support the growing presence of literary writers in higher education. Because, at that time, Departments of English were mainly conservatories of the great literature of the past, scholars fiercely resisted the establishment of creative writing programs. To overcome this resistance and to provide publishing opportunities for young writers, AWP was founded by fifteen writers who represented thirteen writing programs.

Originally named the Associated Writing Programs, the association’s original bylaws made provisions for both institutional members as well as individual members. Since institutions are empty places without individuals to animate them, AWP’s dual membership was an asset in its vitality as an organization. Its dual membership of prestigious universities and accomplished authors persuaded academe that the study of literature should be prospective as well as retrospective—that the study of literature should include the play of creation as well as the work of conservation.

In schools of political science, economics, medicine, architecture, engineering, and business, the most respected teachers were the practitioners of those disciplines—those professors who divided their time between theory and practice, between speculation and pragmatism, between work in academe and work in "the real world." Oddly, English departments included few living practitioners of the art of making literature, although they included many practitioners of criticism and scholarship. The founders of AWP argued that the understanding and appreciation of literature could be enhanced by having practitioners of that art teach that art. It was a radical notion at some institutions, and positions for writers in many departments were hard-won.

Some of the most important writers of this century have attended university writing programs and worked as professors of writing and literature. Richard Bausch, T.C. Boyle, Rosellen Brown, Alan Gurganus, Pam Houston, John Irving, Charles Johnson, Terry McMillan, Lorrie Moore, Jane Smiley, and Alice Sebold are just a few of today’s popular writers who have studied or taught in writing programs. One generation has passed on to the next their understanding of the art of storytelling. At Duke, William Blackburn taught William Styron, Fred Chappell, and Reynolds Price. Price, in turn, taught Josephine Humphries and Anne Tyler. E.L. Doctorow taught Richard Ford at the University of California, Irvine. Donald Dike taught Joyce Carol Oates at Syracuse. Andrew Lytle taught Harry Crews. At Stanford, Wallace Stegner taught Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Raymond Carver, and many others. At the University of Iowa, Kurt Vonnegut once taught a class that included John Casey, Gail Godwin, Andre Dubus, and John Irving among its students.

By offering classes in creative writing, academe has, ironically, reclaimed an aspect of literary study that it had divested when its humanities departments became specialized. In a classical education, students once studied Greek, Latin, rhetoric, and composition by writing stories and poems in Greek or Latin, often in imitation of past masters. Students studied the accomplishments of the past by entering personally engaging practicums that emphasized the creative act. With the acceptance of creative writing programs, departments of literature have restored their original, enabling scope: the study and practice of both the creative and critical literary acts.

Creative writing classes have become among the most popular classes in the humanities. Many students, especially today's students, feel that the world is not of their making, and not theirs to form or to reform; but writing classes often demonstrate the efficacy of the human will—that human experience can be shaped and directed for the good—aesthetically, socially, and politically. In creative writing classes, students learn about elements of literature from inside their own work, rather than from outside a text; and this has motivated many to gain greater command of rhetoric and communication skills in general. In creative writing classes, students also analyze psychology and motives, the dynamics of social classes and individual, regional, and national beliefs. Students shape experiences into stories and poems. They order their lives and their world. In addition to advancing the art of literature, creative writing workshops exercise and strengthen the resourcefulness of the human will, and it is the exercise of will not over others, but for others, as stories and poems are made as gifts for readers and listeners. The making and exchange of literary talents and gifts is, of course, a highly civilized and humane act; and appropriately, academe has accepted the practice and making of the literary arts along with study and scholarship in the literary arts.

AWP is an influential literary organization because it is, in fact, an organization of many organizations and many individuals, as each member college and university creates its own literary community locally while it makes contributions to contemporary letters nationally and internationally. AWP's members teach in hospitals, prisons, elementary schools, high schools, and community centers as well as in colleges and universities.

With 500 colleges and universities, 100 writers’ conferences and centers, and thousands of individual writers as members, AWP has supported countless writers and their work. We turn to literature to confirm that we are not alone, to follow those universal themes of our shared humanity, and we also turn to literature to gain insights into those experiences that are particular to certain nations, times, regions, neighborhoods, colors, and classes of people. We turn to literature to make our lives bigger, and AWP has made the world of literature a larger place.

From 13 member colleges and universities in 1967 to 500 institutional members today, AWP's institutional membership has grown with the growth in the number of programs. The following table quantifies the growth of writing programs and AWP's expansion along with them. The numbers of degree-conferring creative writing programs are taken from The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs, which became a free web-based publication in 2007.

Source: AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs
As of October 2010

AWP has additional statistics on MFA programs. This data is available to member programs at the AWP eLink website in the "Program Support" section.

©2011 The Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
From http://www.awpwriter.org. May only be reprinted with permission.

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