[1] At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States.

[6] In 1922, Dean Carl Seashore of the University of Iowa Graduate College allowed creative writing to be accepted as theses for advanced degrees.

Later, the School of Letters began selecting students for writing courses in which they were tutored by resident and visiting writers.

He partnered with Esquire for a 1959 symposium titled "The Writer in Mass Culture" that included as guests Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and Mark Harris, and was covered in Newsweek.

[8] Engle secured donations for the workshop from the business community for about 20 years, including locals such as Maytag and Quaker Oats, as well as U.S. Steel and Reader's Digest.

The Workshop operated without the characteristic assumption of the time that artists needed to be unleashed, instead opting to focus and refine them.

[14] When the Workshop received the National Humanities Medal in 2002, then director Conroy explained its ethos: "It is a focused program, like Juilliard.

[16]Former faculty have included Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Yates, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Marilynne Robinson.

As of January 2023, the workshop's faculty are Jamel Brinkley, Charles D'Ambrosio, Margot Livesey, and Ladee Hubbard in fiction; Ethan Canin in English and creative writing; James Galvin, Mark Levine, Tracie Morris, Elizabeth Willis in poetry; and Program Director Lan Samantha Chang.

In response to the news, Chang said: The graduates being distinguished by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021 came to the Iowa Writers' Workshop over a period of more than four decades.

[22] Among them have also been editors of major publications, including D. Herbert Lipson of Ebony, and curators, such as Christine Kuan, former CEO and director of Sotheby's Institute of Art New York.

On the HBO show Girls, the character Hannah Horvath enrolls in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.