Cover Photo: An image of some bills 100 dollar bills on fire
Photograph by JP Valery/Unsplash

A Fully Funded MFA Doesn’t Mean Financial Security

As part of our Application Week series, Katerina Ivanov Prado writes about financial insecurity while pursuing her MFA, community, and resilience.

one of fifty-three fiercelybetween one and six percent1.97% in 202020,000-30,000 for a two-year program

fully

this number was raised to 20,000 in 2022four courses per yearan Assistant Professor in Humanities makes $77,000 a year


such as the viral reaction to an article detailing that eighty-nine percent of books published in 2018 were by white authors

Tenure barely exists at this point

I tweeted asking other MFA alums to share the odd jobs they had in order to survive

yes, this conference offers financial aid let me help you with the application, I won the fellowship last year.

growing movements to unionize or go on strike,

Okay,Drive with the windows down, . That shit is toxic.

Katerina Ivanov Prado’s multi-genre writing has been published in Brevity, Passages North, The Rumpus, The Florida Review, The Nashville Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Pinch, Joyland and others.

She has won the John Weston Award for Fiction, the 2019 AWP Intro Journals Award, The Pinch Nonfiction Literary Award, and the Florida Review’s Editor’s Award. She most recently was awarded a LitUp Fellowship by Reese’s Book Club.

She obtained her MFA at University of Arizona and is a Ph.D Candidate in Creative Writing at University of Houston.