When a close friend was researching MFA programs a few years ago, she found the blog of Seth Abramson, a Wisconsin-based poet who made it his business to rank graduate programs in creative writing according to statistics rather than reputation. Abramson, it appears, was drafted by Poets & Writers Magazine to take on the project this year and—give us a "Yawp!" or a "Wahoowa!"—University of Virginia's MFA program ranks third in P&W's list of the top 50 programs in the U.S. for 2010.

Abramson gives a detailed explanation of his methods for several pages, using words like "promulgate" and "irrespective"—read if you wish. Or, check out the numbers: second place in poetry and selectivity rank, fourth in fiction, a solid finish for postgraduate placement and a middle-of-the-pack finish for funding.

Pay your respects to our excellent creative writing faculty here, and read about fiction faculty member Deborah Eisenberg's recent MacArthur grant here. Oh, and Iowa? We'll show you fear in a handful of dust. And there's plenty of dust in the midwest. Shanti shanti shanti.

...For those of you who made it this far, here is a LOLcat version of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."