That Guy in Your MFA is neither a guy nor a student in an MFA program. He’s actually a woman, Dana Schwartz, a Brown University undergraduate. Schwartz also runs the twitter Dystopian YA Novel that satirizes series like Divergent. She tells Chicago Reader that she invented the alter egos because her writing workshops had too many stories about guys on trains:
“They all had trains,” she says, “and a man leaving his family because he is too complicated and deep. It was this wannabe sophomore lit writing that could be Jonathan Franzen, except not quite as good.”
40,000 twitter followers later, Schwartz is finding literary agents have taken an interest and editors want the YA manuscript she’s been writing. As Guy In Your MFA once said: “the only form of art lower than YA fiction is parody.“
