The Iowa Pipeline

What Are Your Odds of Literary Success?

How hard is it, really, to be at the top of the literary field? To attend residencies, win grants, win awards, hit bestseller lists?

There are about 340 million people in the United States. How many of them, do you think, want to be writers? Wattpad, the social media creative writing app, alone has about 18 million monthly users in the US. But let’s say most of them are lurkers. Let’s say, for the sake of this very loose thought experiment, 3.4 million Americans want to be writers, 1 in 100. (If you disagree, feel free to run the numbers below with your own estimate.)

The best way to achieve traditional success is to attend a strong creative writing program. Poets & Writers list 253 MFA programs in the US. Let’s say the average cohort size is about 20 and round the annual number of new MFA students to 5000. Let’s say a generation is 25 years. So that’s 125,000 MFAs, or 3.7% of our initial 3.4 million.

But if you want traditional success, you have vastly better odds with a top program: Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, Stanford. Let’s make a case study of the best program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The Post45 Data Collective has published datasets with: every graduate of the IWW; their advisor; a century of major literary prize data, including winners and judges; everyone who has won an NEA literature award; and a century of NYT hardcover fiction bestsellers. I built an additional dataset of everyone who has attended MacDowell, one of the most prestigious writers’ residencies. These datasets, plus Claude Code, enabled me to analyze the pipeline, and the odds. Let’s take a look.

From 1931 to 2014, IWW graduated 3006 students. That’s a few generations, but we’ll keep going with our numbers: 3006 is 2.4% of our 125,000. Of these 3006, 2468, or 82.1%, never went to MacDowell, won an NEA or a major award, or hit the NYT bestseller list. So that’s 538, or 17.9%, who move on.

The best thing an Iowa grad can do, per this data, to maximize success, is aim next for MacDowell and an NEA. 206 (6.9%) attended MacDowell, on average six years after graduation. Those who attended MacDowell were 7.8x more likely to win a major prize than those Iowa grads who didn’t. 300 Iowa grads (10%) won an NEA, on average eight years after graduation. Those with an NEA are 14x more likely to win a major prize than Iowa grads without. 64 (2.1%) Iowa grads went to MacDowell and won an NEA. They are 44.2x more likely than Iowa grads with neither to win a major prize.

How many Iowa grads then go on to win a major prize? 125, or 4.2%. It takes on average five years to go from MacDowell to a major prize, six years with an NEA. Who are these writers? The most awarded in our prize database: Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Yiyun Li, Charles Wright, Rita Dove, Denis Johnson, Donald Justice, Charles D’Ambrosio, Stuart Dybek, James Alan McPherson, Sandra Cisneros, Ann Patchett, and 111 others.

Only 24 Iowa grads hit the NYT bestseller list. It’s a fiction list, and 1778 of the Iowa grads have a specified fiction degree, so those odds are 1.3%. We’re talking about John Irving, Elin Hilderbrand, Kent Haruf, Allan Gurganus, Jane Smiley, Ann Patchett (again), Adam Haslett, Ayana Mathis, and sixteen others.

(I have ten years of international bestseller lists from countries around the world, from 2013-22. It’s not at parity with the other data. But for what it’s worth, only two Iowa graduates hit these lists. Kent Haruf in Italy in 2020 with the translation into Italian of Where You Once Belonged, and Ava Dellaira in Mexico in 2019 with Love Lettersto the Dead.)

So. Who managed do it all (by these metrics?). Only two: Justin Cronin and Jayne Anne Phillips. By the extremely idiosyncratic metric of having been heard of by this scholar of 20th and 21st century US fiction, we lose Justin Cronin. (I’d never heard of him!) He attended Harvard before going to IWW and is perhaps best known for a vampire trilogy beginning with The Passage. Phillips has led an extraordinary career. She hit the NYT list early, in 1984. She has judged major prizes 23 times (6th among Iowa grads). She attended MacDowell eight times (3rd most), won two NEAs. And she culminated her career with a Pulitzer in 2024. Given her background, she is exceptionally exceptional: she was born in a small West Virginia town and attended West Virginia University before going to Iowa. She beat extraordinary odds—the wildest, wildest odds—to reach the pinnacle of the literary field.

Because, when doing these kinds of analyses, which I’ve done for a long time, without have the new massive firepower from the Post45 Data Collective + Claude Code, I’ve come to think of Zip Code as Destiny. Where you’re born determines so much about your odds. You’re just at a profound advantage if you’re from 06883 (Weston, CT) or 10514 (Chappaqua, NY) or 10007 (Lower Manhattan, NY) or 02468 (Newton, MA) than if you’re from just about anywhere else. You have the money, the connections, the sociolect to get into an Ivy+ school, which makes it vastly easier to get into Iowa, which makes it vastly easier to win further credentials.

But what this analysis has also shown is that it’s still, even if you’re born with all the advantages, stupidly difficult to succeed in the literary field. Even if you graduate from Iowa, with the best, most prestigious MFA, you still have better than 4 of 5 odds that you’ll never go to MacDowell, or win an NEA, or win one of a number of major prizes, or hit the NYT bestseller list. You’re actually extremely unlikely to do the last two. And if we go back to our initial 3.4 million aspiring writers in the US? Your odds of doing all the above are .000059%. You literally have a better chance of being hit by lightning this year.

This is an admittedly narrow analysis, done with the data available to me right now. It would be amazing to combine this with publishing industry data, literary agent data, figure out how that plays into the odds. But we can guess. All of this is reason to celebrate the DIY punk ethos advocated here by Lincoln Michel, the upstart literary worlds of The Metropolitan Review and Zona Motel and Book Post. As I wrote for LARB a few years ago: “Today when asked for advice about how to be a writer, I say: Find writing you love and follow it. Make those writers your writers. Read each other, publish each other, create literature that speaks from where you are. Take as your model Belt Publishing or Cave Canem or Deep Vellum or Dorothy: A Publishing Project or Hub City Press or Sublunary Editions. Fuck the Poetry Police. Learn from others. Think collectively. Make an aesthetic of your own. ‘Poets, descend,’ writes Ferlinghetti, ‘to the street of the world once more.’ Out from the shadows, into the light.”

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CAVEAT: There are probably some mistakes here, though if so, I suspect they are minor. I used Claude Code to run the numbers, do cross-dataset analyses. There are complications around matching names that sometimes appear differently in different datasets. I encourage you to go into the data and check my work—and see what else you can find! All the data is available at the Post45 Data Collective, except for the MacDowell data, which I’ll send you if you email me and ask. There’s so much more that could be folded into analyses of literary prestige and sales. What I’ve done here is really just tip of the iceberg, meant to inspire more work rather than have any pretense toward being comprehensive.