Iowa Residency: End of the road?
Many Indian writers have benefitted from the famed Iowa Writing Program, but recent funding cuts threaten to close this window of opportunity
When Bengali poet and novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay was writing his first novel, Atmaprakash (Self Revelation, 1964), he used a narrative technique he had learned from American Beat writer Jack Kerouac. “I don’t have to go looking around for plots,” Gangopadhyay recalls Kerouac telling him, in his autobiography Ardhek Jibon (Half a Life, 2000). “Before starting a novel, I try to recollect some of my experiences. What was I doing that month of that year? When I remember, I start writing from there. The writing progresses on its own.”
Much of Kerouac’s own writing was autobiographical. A few of Gangopadhyay’s early novels also recounted his adventures with his poet and writer friends. This unexpected influence of avant-garde American literature on its Indian counterpart was made possible through the University of Iowa’s (UoI’s) reputed writing programme, where Gangopadhyay was a resident in 1963–64.
The university’s graduate writing programme, Iowa Writer’s Workshop, is one of the oldest and most famous creative writing courses in the US. As a counterpart to it, poet Paul Engle and novelist and editor Hualing Nieh Engle established, in 1967, the Iowa Writing Program (IWP), a non-academic writers’ residency for international artists and writers, at UoI. Since then, it has “welcomed 1,600 writers from over 160 countries”, claims its website. Among its notable alumni are Nobel Laureates Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), Mo Yan (China) and Hang Kan (South Korea).
The IWP has also been an important destination for many Indian writers. Gangopadhyay returned to Iowa in 1982 as a resident at the IWP. Several other Bengali writers — Shankha Ghosh, Joy Goswami, Srijato, among others — have also been to the residency. Writers from other Indian languages, such as Devanur Mahadeva (Kannada) and Ashokamitran (Tamil) have been residents at the IWP. Among Indian writers writing in English, Ranjit Hoskote, Abhay K, Sridala Swami, Rochelle Potkar, Meena Kandasamy, Akhil Katyal, Chandramohan S, Adil Jussawalla and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra have had stints at the residency.
This is, of course, not an exhaustive list. On a personal note, I had self-nominated myself for the residency in 2022 — but unsuccessfully. I hoped to apply again, after a few years. However, now it seems this opportunity will cease to be available to Indian writers.
On February 26, the IWP was informed by the US government that its grants from the Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, was being terminated. The IWP was told that its work did not “align with agency priorities and national interest” anymore, according to a statement on its website. An immediate effect of the cut would be the overall reduction of the Fall residency cohort by half. This would adversely affect the potential of having international writers, including Indians, at the residency.
“Without federal funding, there will be no Indian writers at the IWP’s Fall residency,” said American poet and IWP’s director since 2000, Christopher Merill, over an email. He added: “The writers we will host this Fall will come courtesy bilateral agreements we have forged with foreign ministries of culture, arts councils and non-government organisations.”
Indian writers in Iowa
As the news of the funding cuts spread, several writers around the world wrote in support of the IWP. Many recollected how the residency had helped in their own growth. I interviewed seven Indian writers over email, asking them to tell me about their time at residency and how it had helped in their careers. I also asked them to reflect on how the end of this opportunity would affect the Indian literary landscape.
Poet, translator, cultural theorist and curator Ranjit Hoskote was 26 years old when he went to the Fall residency in 1995. It provided him with an opportunity to interact with several accomplished and famous international literary figures. “Meeting writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Louise Glück, David Lodge, Daniel Halpern, Mark Doty and others in the course of everyday life, at readings, talks, discussions, at dinners and parties — it was a heady experience,” he said. “It confirmed me in my commitment to a life devoted to the literary arts.”
Hoskote, who has recently published a collection of essays, To Break and to Branch (2024) and a translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry from Urdu to English, The Homeland’s an Ocean (2024), was already writing for journals and newspapers when he went to the IWP. “The pace of my life was hectic,” he told me over email. “The IWP gave me the repose to reflect quietly on what it meant to truly be a writer.”
His conversations with translator Daniel Weissbort, South Asia scholar Philip Lutgendorf, historian Paul Greenough and writer Peter Nazareth have continued to inform and inspire him over the past three decades, added Hoskote.
Other writers also told me how the IWP helped mould their artistic outlook.
For poet, critic and artist Sukrita Paul Kumar, who was at the IWP in the Fall of 2002, the residency marked a critical turn in her writing. “I slowly started withdrawing from producing critical papers and instead engaged with more of creative writing,” she told me over email. “The exposure to different modes of writing poetry at the residency, with so many other writers and poets, helped me experiment boldly with my own work.”
Paul Kumar has been to several other residencies, both in India and abroad: She has been a poet in residence in Hong Kong and a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. “Fellowships and residencies, like the IWP, offer an opportunity to interact with writers from different backgrounds,” said Paul Kumar, recalling how moved she was on hearing the recitation of an Arabic poem.
A German poet she met at the IWP translated her poem, which was then composed into a song. “It was thrilling to receive the beautifully designed booklet, with my poem in two languages and the musical notations, at my home in India,” said Paul Kumar. “The loss of such opportunities for writers and artists would be unfortunate.”
A transformative experience
While some writers carry the memories of their residency, others return to it over the years.
Mumbai-based poet and screenwriter Rochelle Potkar was a resident at the IWP in the Fall of 2015, but she returned to Iowa for the residency’s Summer Institute in 2019 as a creative writing mentor. She also taught haiku, haibun, and free verse poetry, as well as writing screenplays and short fiction to international students at the residency’s Between the Lines summer youth programme from 2022 to 2024. (This is one of the programmes that the IWP scrapped immediately after its funding was withdrawn.)
“You are never the same person after you return from Iowa,” said Potkar over an email interview. “Iowa is a heavenly place… especially in the Fall. The three-month residency is designed as a series of exciting events — films, readings, poetry slams and open mics, dramatic readings, karaoke readings, and book launches. You can do so much! Everyone in Iowa seems to be working on a thesis or a manuscript. Even park benches have proverbs inscribed on them.”
But people, even in the US, are also not always aware of this literary haven. “Once on arriving in the US, the immigration officer wondered why I was going to a place full of corn fields!” said Potkar, adding that in Iowa she found a community that might not always be possible in India. It also gave her “unprecedented and unwavering” levels of confidence, which helped her curate a residency programme in Mumbai in 2017.
Community, confidence and hope
If community and confidence sustain writers and artists, the COVID-19 pandemic and its enforced social distancing were challenging times. For poet, curator and artist Madhu Raghavendra, going to the IWP in the spring of 2022 was an affirming experience. “The COVID-19-related travel restrictions made the timing of our cohort unique — March to May,” he told me over email. “There were only 16 participants and it was like a family.” All of them still have a WhatsApp group called “Spring Begins Now”, and they even applied to the Saari Residency in Finland as a collective of writers.
From curating poetry readings at the local Deadwood bar, attending the Jazz Festival in Pittsburgh, crashing parties in the East Village and reading his poems in front of Salman Rushdie at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the IWP experience was a blast for Raghavendra. “Most of my poetry comes from lived experience,” he said. “I lived a life within a life — I want that for many of my fellow emerging poets in India.”
For poet, novelist, editor and curator Pervin Saket, the IWP provided her with hope in literature when she was almost starting to lose it. “In 2023, I curated a panel at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival (in Mumbai) comprising publishers and agents,” she said in an email. “As the discussion progressed, I was overcome by a sinking feeling. According to the panellists, there was no hope for literary fiction in India, maybe a sliver for translations. As for poetry, you might as well flush your manuscript down the toilet.”
However, the residency in Iowa changed her perspective. “When I went to Iowa (and later met agents in New York City), I realised how limited this view was,” she added. “Editors here (in India) seem to project their own helplessness as a market shortcoming.”
Saket was at the IWP when Donald Trump won his second, non consecutive, term as the President of the US in late 2024. “The mood was anxious and sombre, but I did not really believe that it would come to this,” she said. “Just a month earlier, we had received news about Hang Kan, an IWP alumnus, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. That should have impressed any grants committee.”
Evidently, in this case, it did not.
While most writers reported that IWP provided them with a community of international peers, others feel it could have done more to be egalitarian. Poet and essayist Chandramohan S, who was a resident at the IWP in 2018, told me over email: “Devannur Mahadeva and I are the only Dalit writers to have ever been at the IWP, perhaps because of the casteist gatekeeping by some selectors.”
He added the end of the residency for Indians was “the end of an era.” “But many other opportunities may have sprung up elsewhere,” he added. “Indian writers do not necessarily need validation from the West anymore.”
Denmark-based Indian novelist Tabish Khair, who was also a resident at the IWP in 2024, seemed to agree. “Cutting funding to an influential programme like the IWP will not harm Indian or international literature much,” he told me over email, “but it will drastically reduce the powerful influence of US cultural diplomacy. In short, as with tariffs, the Trump regime is shooting its own country in the foot.”
IWP director Merill also regretted the decision of the US Department of State. “It will only further isolate my country,” he said.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist. Translations from Bengali are his own.