Our History

IUWC History, 1940-2008

The Indiana University Writers' Conference, the second-oldest writers' conference in the nation, was initiated in 1940 by Cecilia Hendricks (then an associate professor of English at IU), and Herman B. Wells (former President and Chancellor of IU). The IUWC was created to provide a forum for the support and advancement of creative writing in the Midwest, as well as to rejuvenate Indiana's literary heritage. At the time, the eastern and western United States were provided for by Breadloaf and the Colorado University Writers' Conference; Indiana thus became the first home for a conference fostering writers in the Midwest.

The first conference staff consisted of acclaimed authors John Gould Fletcher, a 1939 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Will David Howe, a book editor at the Bobbs Merrill Company in Indianapolis; Jesse Stuart, novelist and holder of a Guggenheim Fellowship; Karl W. Detzer, a novelist, short story and screenplay writer, and an editor for Readers' Digest; Maxwell Aley, a literary agent from New York City; Jeanette Covert Nolan, an author of both adult and children's literature; Margaret Weymouth Jackson, a novelist and translator; and Miriam Mason Swain, a short story and children's novelist. The IUWC has continued to draw a strong faculty base, hosting 21 Pulitzer Prize winners, 14 of the 36 US Poets Laureate, and 22 National Book Award winners.

The conference has undergone many changes throughout its history. In addition to fiction and poetry, one of the most popular workshops throughout the 40's was in radio script writing; from the mid-50's and into the 60's, television writing was offered. By that time, the IUWC had become a highly acclaimed conference, having hosted such writers as Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor.

Poet Roger Mitchell, former poetry instructor at IU, became the conference director in 1976. Seeing that much of the energy of the conference had become focused on marketing and commercial writing, he decided to reinstate the conference's craft-based origins. Gradually, the IUWC took on a shape close to its current form: three poetry workshops, two fiction workshops, and a sixth workshop combining poetry and fiction. In an effort to draw younger writers to the conference, the conference workshops were offered for university credit. Since the early 70's, teaching authors such as Raymond Carver, Gwendolyn Brooks, Andre Dubus, Lisel Mueller, Mark Doty and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. have all served as IUWC faculty.

The IUWC has also played a large role in laying the groundwork for the construction of other scholarly and literary offerings at Indiana University. Its success, and the energy which it brought to IU, greatly influenced the establishment and development of the School of Letters, a formal gathering of nationally acclaimed writers and literary critics at IU from 1950 to the late 60's. The IUWC also predated and helped advance serious courses in the writing of poetry and fiction at IU, offerings which eventually built IU's nationally ranked Creative Writing Program.