Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) I was a working poet for 15 years. This is a thread about the worst thing I ever saw a poet do in my life—which, if you know how poets can be, is saying something. The poet in question is @matthewzapruder, and his actions cost US poets over $50 million. Read on for more.

1/ Back in the late aughts, I developed an assessment mechanism for graduate programs in creative writing (MFA programs) with only *one* goal in mind: assess, for the first time in the history of the creative writing MFA, the amount of money programs give to their young students.

2/ The problem we were having in creative writing—had had since creative writing MFAs were invented in the 1930s—was one of *access*: poor poets couldn't afford to get an MFA, largely because, though the MFA is a terminal degree, it bucks national trends and *isn't* fully funded.

3/ @MatthewZapruder worked (and works) at an insanely expensive MFA program that gives almost no money to its young students, creating a situation—as every nearly wholly unfunded MFA does—in which its graduates can never pay back their loans and sometimes must declare bankruptcy.

4/ As @MatthewZapruder knows—and as I began writing about in every essay I published on MFA programs in the late aughts and early 2010s, and later in a book on MFAs—the MFA isn't a professional degree, so you can't earn back the money you pay for it by getting a job in the field.

5/ In fact, as the first dedicated data journalist in creative writing in its 85-year history, I was the first to report a dirty truth that unfunded programs like those @MatthewZapruder works in had been hiding: that less than 2% of MFA grads will ever work fulltime in the field.

6/ So I created an assessment scheme for MFAs intended to *replace* the prior assessment scheme, one devised (and quickly abandoned as terminally flawed) by U.S. News & World Report: a scheme that simply asked professors like @MatthewZapruder what they thought of other programs.

7/ Under the "USNWR" system, wealthy and well-published poets like @MatthewZapruder determined which MFAs would be considered "prestigious," so they did what you'd expect—they selected the programs their friends taught at (and vice versa) whether fully funded for students or not.

8/ The scheme I created, which was adopted for many years by Poets & Writers—the main trade magazine in the field of creative writing—instead tried to gauge which programs *applicants* were most excited about. Why? Because I knew they considered the factors *students* care about.

9/ In addition to polling thousands of MFA applicants to learn their values and interests—the first such polls ever taken in a field that previously had only cared what powerful artists like @MatthewZapruder thought—I gathered hard data on every MFA in *twenty* assessment areas.

10/ For the first time in 80 years, aspiring poets, fiction-writers, and memoirists actually had a resource that would tell them which MFAs fund their students—as well as other key "access" measures like cost of living, postgraduate job placement, student-faculty ratio, and more.

11/ The data—published annually—was a fabulous success in the only measure I cared about: it led scores of programs to add literally *tens of millions of dollars in new funding* for their incoming students. The data created accountability in a discipline that previously had none.

12/ MFA program directors privately wrote me by the scores, thanking me for giving them hard data that they could show to administrators at their colleges and universities. They knew they needed to do better in funding their kids—and now they had *public* hard data to prove that.

13/ I was so thrilled by this, and also by the literally hundreds of emails I got from applicants each year telling me that they would've gone into debt for an MFA—up to *$125,000* for a non-professional two-degree art degree—had it not been for the data I painstakingly compiled.

14/ I can't tell you how many *hundreds* of hours I spent each year compiling that data, almost all of which I gave away for free online (I received a very modest stipend from Poets & Writers, which came out to the amount per hour you would've paid a new babysitter in the 1980s).

15/ But my work created a problem for powerful, well-paid writers like @MatthewZapruder—and if you don't know how selfish so many poets are, I can tell you that you're going to be *unbelievably surprised* by what the "problem" was that led these people to try to end my work cold.

16/ The "problem" @MatthewZapruder had, exclusively because he worked at a school—in the most expensive city in America—that charged students an exorbitant tuition for a non-professional art degree...

...was that my work meant his annual incoming class wasn't as good at writing.

17/ Once applicants knew which MFAs would fully fund them, the most far-along young poets/writers began applying to *exclusively* those programs—leaving professors like @MatthewZapruder with jobs that were (how do I put it) "less fun" than they would've preferred. Yes—that's all.

18/ Instead of fighting to increase funding—as scores of other writing professors were, using my work as leverage—@MatthewZapruder led a national campaign to get Poets & Writers to stop publishing my data. He also convinced his peers—secretly thrilled with me—to publicly shun me.

19/ He did this, in part, by organizing a campaign against my research. But he also made up lies—telling my bosses at Poets & Writers magazine that if they didn't stop publishing my work, Facebook would sue them and end the magazine. (I took some of my data from Facebook groups.)

20/ Under enormous pressure—even as MFA programs were annually adding, using my data, *millions* in new funding for students—Poets & Writers told me they'd have to go in a different direction. They said they couldn't handle the pressure from people like @MatthewZapruder anymore.

21/ The result of the actions of @MatthewZapruder is that—since the assessment mechanism was shelved (at least in Poets & Writers) 7 years ago, and basing this on the information I was getting via program directors annually at the time—Zapruder cost MFA students over $50 million.

22/ Now imagine if *you* had—out of *selfishness*, and wanting your job to be a bit more "fun"—cost impoverished young artists $50 million in seven years. You'd crawl into a hole. I know I would. Instead, @MatthewZapruder went on a campaign to convince people...

...I was greedy.

23/ At the time I did my research, I was a grad student making 15K/year—with debts of 140K, as I'd chosen to be a *public defender* after law school (turning down opportunities for a salary far higher). But @MatthewZapruder knew what Karl Rove did: attack your enemy's *strength*.

24/ @MatthewZapruder was a famous poet with a big audience, and me—not so much. So when @MatthewZapruder chose to crush me, the hundreds of MFA applicants I'd aided wrote me privately—handfuls/week—saying @MatthewZapruder and his crew were too powerful for them to publicly cross.

25/ It was the actions of @MatthewZapruder—in great part—that chased me from poetry. He set against me those I'd been trying to help—pro bono—for a decade. But the way it ended up is this: I now have an audience, at least on Twitter, approximately 70 times larger than Zapruder's.

CONCLUSION/ Karma's important. What @MatthewZapruder did—in robbing a generation of young poets/writers of fully funded tuition packages that would've existed around the country if not for him and his friends—is, if nothing else, put me in a position to discuss this with you all.

PS1/ A brief anecdote to give you a sense of the *character* of @MatthewZapruder. Once, during his secret assault on my work—I didn't know about it yet—we spoke on Facebook. He was upset that I'd remixed a poem of his (I was an inveterate remixer as a poet); we hashed things out.

PS2/ There was a big conference coming up, so Zapruder asked me to come by the table he'd be working at a book fair at the conference. He said we could chat. I was thrilled; I didn't know many poets in *person*, so the chance to make a new friend of a fellow poet was huge for me.

PS3/ Reader, this is what this person did: after being nice to me on Facebook, and inviting me to chat and hang out with him at the conference, he—when I got to his table at the book fair—spent five minutes studiously, even melodramatically, ignoring me. It'd all been a *set-up*.

PS4/ In retrospect, I shouldn't be surprised—the sort of person who effectively (and knowingly) robbed impoverished young artists of millions of dollars for his own satisfaction would *easily* be the sort of person who'd orchestrate a public humiliation of someone he didn't know.

PS5/ I'll close by saying this—@MatthewZapruder is the single worst human I ever met in 15 years in poetry. Selfish; cruel; a liar. He cost his peers more than they'll *ever* know. But I'm *thankful* he forced me out of the sort of community that would have someone like him. /end

NOTE/ Sometimes you just have to call out a jerk. But honestly? I wouldn't have done it if he'd just *left me alone* for the last decade. But he had to *keep hounding me on Twitter* and—JFC—in the middle of a damn *national emergency* I'm trying to use my skills to fight against.

NOTE2/ This thread was prompted by a tweet in which @MatthewZapruder called me a "vampire" feeding off "young poets"—referring to my work from 2008-2013, which is a totally normal, non-stalkery thing to do...in 2019. He's since deleted the tweet so my thread will seem unprovoked.

NOTE3/ The math: MFA programs average 2.5 years in duration; MFAs average 20 students; one full funding line is valued at—on average—$65,000 in tuition and stipend per year, $162,500 per course of study; there are 250 MFA programs; it's been 7 years. $50 million is conservative.

NOTE4/ It'd only take the lack of accountability costing MFA applicants 114 funding lines *nationwide* per annum—across 250 programs—for total cost to reach $50 million in 7 years. A data journalist in the field knows this; a guy who doesn't care about his students' debt doesn't.

NOTE5/ This thread repeatedly noted it was Zapruder *and others* who were involved in the effort to make their classes more fun by destroying accountability for unfunded MFAs. Sadly, though Zapruder teaches *reading* you have to argue down with people like this...about *reading*.

NOTE6/ The gaslighting is getting pretty heavy on his Twitter feed, so to be clear: I caught this guy at AWP demanding *face-to-face* that my boss, Kevin Larimer, fire me—and raising the threat of a Facebook lawsuit. He wasn't just "one among many"—he led the charge and knows it.