Tony Tulathimutte didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a writer.

“I was just kind of a nerd and a loser,” says the 2012 University of Iowa graduate who grew up in western Massachusetts. A nerd and a loser, he clarifies, with plenty of hobbies: sports, clubs, musical instruments, and lots of video games. “One thing I did not do was write.”

That changed when he took a creative writing class as an undergraduate at Stanford University, which led to more writing classes and eventually a minor in the subject. Still, Tulathimutte chose what seemed like a more practical path after college and spent five years working in the user experience field in Silicon Valley — a career he hated.

As unemployment grew during the Great Recession, Tulathimutte took a chance and applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Then, in the same week he was laid off, he learned he had been accepted to the workshop.

At Iowa, Tulathimutte discovered both the difficulty of writing and the value of having the time, space, and community to do it. He worked on his first novel, Private Citizens, as a UI student, and his 2024 short story collection, Rejection, was longlisted for the National Book Award. In 2026, Tulathimutte was named the recipient of the inaugural Jack Galef Literary Arts Award, which is administered by the workshop and is one of the largest literary prizes in the United States.

Now back on campus as a visiting faculty member, Tulathimutte, who lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York, is drawing on his own writing education as he works with a new generation of UI writers. His goals, he says, extend beyond craft. He wants students to understand how publishing works, to resist writing for the person they imagine will be reading, and, perhaps most importantly, to leave his classroom believing that a writing life is possible.

What do you hope to impart to your students?

At the very baseline, I’m hoping to give them a rigorous education in craft. But more than that, the real important thing to be picking up at this point in a writing career is morale.

Writing is always difficult, but it’s never impossible. It’s not this pipe dream. People publish books all the time. I think the metagame for teaching writing is to show people just how possible it is. It’s not just a matter of luck or whether you work in a very conventional or popular idiom or genre. There’s always a path forward no matter what kind of writer you are.

What makes Iowa a valuable place for writers?

A creative writing program is only useful insofar as you make it useful. It’s the amount of effort that you put into it, the amount of discipline you’re able to maintain in it, and the extent to which you’re able to keep yourself from going insane. I think it’s more useful to view an MFA program as a very rare form of patronage that exists. And because Iowa is a fully funded program, you’re in effect being paid to write for two to three years. That is not a deal that most people get for the rest of their lives.

At Iowa, you have a mandate to write. You’re in a community of writers and you learn from them. I think that is where the real education comes from. And that community isn’t limited to the workshop — you also have the Nonfiction Writing Program, the International Writing Program, the Spanish creative writing program, playwrights, screenwriters, translators, visiting guests and faculty members, and the dozens of alumni who stick around, all cheek by jowl within a mile radius of one another.

The companionship that is tied to writing makes it a lot more bearable. I am grateful that some of my friends from grad school still live in Iowa City. It’s been wonderful to be able to hang out with them here because it’s hard to see them when I’m in New York.

What advice would you give aspiring writers, especially those hoping to get into a program like Iowa?

I have one very practical piece of advice and then one more general one. The practical advice is don’t feel obligated to max out the page count. More is not necessarily better. I think that you just submit your best work, not necessarily the most work.

The more philosophical advice would be: Don’t pander. Don’t try to game out in your head what you think this random reader on the other side is going to want or what the institution wants to see out of your writing. First of all, you have no idea whose desk your writing is going to land on. But also, it is going to be one of your early lessons in standing by what you really want to write and are really interested in.

What inspires your writing?

Just being a nasty freak, I guess. There is a lot that is kind of punishing and punitive about being a writer. It’s not something a lot of people would find worth pursuing if they didn’t have a lot of insane thoughts that they needed to get out.

But obviously it’s not just bleeding on the page. It’s only really worthwhile if you take all these messy thoughts and discipline them into some kind of a form that holds up, that stands.

A lot of my writing is about feelings of loneliness, isolation, alienation, and things like that. So, not exactly beach reading material, but I also like to think that it’s pretty funny, too.

What do you enjoy about the writing process?

For a lot of writers, writing is deeply unpleasant, usually day in and day out. But so are a lot of jobs. And there are also a lot of nice things about it. Writing is the only place you’re really completely free. In my case, it’s the only thing that is completely mine as well. That’s not to say I don’t rely on other people for help and guidance, but it’s my thing. My books wouldn’t exist without me.

And every now and then you have a really good day and surprise yourself. It’s like when you’re at a party and a really funny joke pops out of your mouth and everybody laughs. Writing is a way to capture things like that and make them permanent, creating something where nothing existed before.