MFA fiction programs may have no fiercer critic than Elif Batuman. She has mocked the writing workshop multiple times in print and mourned the kind of prose it …

Maggie Doherty
Maggie Doherty is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (Knopf, 2020). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. She teaches first-year writing at Harvard University.