It’s time to acknowledge what should be apparent for to anyone paying attention: creativewritingmfa.info is no longer a going concern. I’ve enjoyed the occasional moments when I’ve been the bearer of good news to some writer that they were listed in the back of Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays or The Pushcart Prize Stories an honor that the publishers of those anthologies don’t bother to inform the honorees of themselves. Then there are the occasions in which a piece was miscategorized (a number of notable essays have actually been fiction and the Pushcart anthology occasionally lists items in the back of the book—and occasionlly the front of the book—in the wrong category). 

I had hoped that there would be some Moneyball-style discovery of under-appreciated programs, and I suppose there was in that Johns Hopkins University, which is not one of the programs that immediately leaps to mind when people think about the top programs, came out at the top or near it in the years that I generated rankings. It came out with exemplary scores for Poetry and Fiction, but the Creative Non-Fiction score was complicated by the fact that the Writing Seminars initially had a CNF program, but then discontinued it, but another program was created and untangling what was what in that context seemed intractable with my correspondent insisting that I continually had things wrong.

In any event, as many correspondents pointed out, the whole idea of ranking programs is not necessarily useful. Certainly, I entered my own MFA program after I’d started this project and attended a program that wasn’t even listed (I was the second cohort ever to attend).

I think there’s also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the rankings. If you’re an immensely gifted writer, you’re likely to apply to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and be accepted, but you would probably do just fine even if you decided to forgo the MFA.

The old rankings will continue to exist on this site, but I will not be updating those pages.