Writing at Pratt
Pratt’s BFA in Writing prepares you to become a highly proficient and self-sustaining creative writer. Through our studio-based approach and our commitments to inquiry, creative research, and critical self-reflection, you’ll expand your creative range, investigate the cultural and historical forces that have sculpted literary traditions, become an expert practitioner, and explore other fields offered at Pratt. Your creative expression is our focus, balanced with professional preparation and community engagement to prepare you to navigate the changing literary landscape. Combining rigor with care, we actively shape your time at Pratt and connect you to campus resources, so that—despite the solitude that sometimes attends the writing life—you’ll feel supported and equipped to achieve your goals.
The Experience
Interdisciplinary, socially engaged, and deeply personalized, our tight-knit writing community values a plurality of voices and approaches to writing, both on and off the page. You’ll gather with your peers twice a week for intensive studios, where feedback sessions, generative writing, and collaborative thinking take place. You can explore specialized writing electives in screenwriting, dystopian fiction, environmental writing, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. First-year foundational courses include critical thinking and writing, world literature, writing elements, and community as classroom. A small student-to-faculty ratio on the Brooklyn campus fosters an intimate sense of community, as do on-campus readings and departmental social events.
Community
The BFA Writing offers a suite of courses designed to prepare undergraduates for a life in writing, in all of its dimensions. Taken in the first year, the “Community as Classroom” course will immerse you in the vast literary series, institutions, venues, and activities across the city, as sources not only for what kinds of things are happening in writing right now but also the artistic lineages they are part of.
Professional Development
We help our students build meaningful, creative, and sustainable writing lives, especially in the years following graduation. The third year course “Writer as Worker” provides concrete skills and guidance to discern, acquire, and plan for a professional development track in the spring semester. Weekly visits with guest authors, agents, editors, journalists, teachers, filmmakers, and theater artists helps you make informed choices about the work/life experiences you’d like to explore in the coming semesters, and beyond. Practical survival skills and support like internships, job search basics, grants, fellowships, and grad school are covered as ways to build a writing life that inspires you.
Internship & Fieldwork
A one-semester credit-bearing internship or independent fieldwork project is accompanied by a guided professional exploration course. Depending on your interests, you could intern at a publishing house, literary agency, film/TV studio, podcast network, news publication, arts organization or nonprofit. Fieldwork projects could include starting a literary journal, publishing a zine, planning a symposium, developing a podcast pilot, building an artist website, learning how to produce and fund theatrical and film productions, and many others. Past sites have also included The Poetry Project, Nightboat Books, Belladonna* Collaborative, Ugly Duckling Presse, The Brooklyn Rail, and Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. The accompanying course ensures your work becomes an educational opportunity through which you can effectively discern the material realities of the writing life and the labor that sustains it.
Study Abroad
Berlin, Germany is an ideal city for you to broaden your cultural, intellectual, and creative horizons. For a writer, spending a semester abroad can be a powerful experience, offering you the chance to shift perspectives, learn new cultural narratives, and form more expansive world views, all of which deepen and complicate your imaginative potential. The chance to learn a new language is also a direct way to more fully understand and develop your own native language. The Pratt Berlin study abroad program offers sophomores and juniors a chance to spend a semester in one of Europe’s most vibrant artistic and literary cities. Housed in a newly renovated button factory in Kreuzberg, one of Berlin’s most central and exciting neighborhoods, the program offers writing majors and minors in creative writing, critical and visual studies, and humanities and media studies a full 16 credits of core classes and electives with BFA Writing faculty. Visit Pratt’s Study Abroad Program page.
Events and Visiting Writers
Our Writer at Large program, the annual Michael Mahoney Memorial Reading, the MFA’s Writing Activisms series, and other events bring renowned writers to campus for readings, workshops, and manuscript consultations. Beyond these events, department faculty regularly invite writers to spend time with their classes including Ottessa Moshfegh, Ross Gay, Simone White, Layli Long Soldier, Alexander Chee, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Michelle Tea, Asiya Wadud, Chloë Bass, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and others.
The Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics
Learning Resources
We develop disciplinary fluency in our program of study and we celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of design critical to address the plurality and complexity of the environments in which we operate. Learning resources
Our Faculty
Pratt’s distinguished faculty of ou- tstanding creative professionals and scholars share a common desire to develop each student’s potential and creativity to the fullest. All are practicing writers who are engaged in New York City’s vibrant literary community. Bringing different views, methods, and perspectives they provide a rigorous educational model in which students make and learn. See all Writing faculty and administrators.
Our Alumni
Pratt’s distinguished alumni are leading diverse and thriving careers, addressing critical challenges and creating innovative work that reimagines our world.
Where They Work
- Carly Tagen-Dye, Editorial Assistant, People Magazine
- Anika Jade Levy, Founding Editor, Forever Magazine
- Alexa Trembly and Emory Harkins, Twenty Stories Bookstore
- Ryan Carson, Founder, NO OD NY
- Erin Perez, Poetry Teacher, Saint Ann’s School
MFA Programs Attended by BFA Writing Alumni
- Erica Ammann, Brown University MFA Literary Arts Program
- Leia Bradley and Anika Jade Levy, Columbia University MFA Writing Program
- Adrian Shirk, University of Wyoming MFA Creative Writing Program
- Cristina Merino, The New School MFA Creative Writing Program
Alumni Publications
- Adrian Shirk, Heaven Is a Place on Earth (Counterpoint, 2022)
- Laura Henriksen, Laura’s Desires (Nightboat Books, 2024)
- Phoebe Robinson, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes (Tiny Reparations Books, 2021)
- Brandi Spering, This I Can Tell You (Perennial Press, 2021)
- Kate Gavino, A Career in Books (Plume, 2022)
Success Stories
Ready for More?
| HERE’S HOW TO APPLY | PORTFOLIO HELP | OUR CAMPUS & BEYOND |
|---|---|---|
| Join us at Pratt. Learn more about admissions requirements, plan your visit, talk to a counselor, and start your application. Take the next step. | Building your portfolio can be daunting. We’ll answer your questions and help you feel confident about the portfolio you submit with your application. Start building your portfolio, now. | You’ll find yourself at home at Pratt. Learn more about our residence halls, student organizations, athletics, gallery exhibitions, events, the amazing City of New York and our Brooklyn neighborhood communities. Check us out. |
