Our M.F.A. in writing offers the contemporary writer tools and support to cultivate a practice that is responsive to our rapidly evolving environmental and political times.
Through weekly Writing Studio critiques with students, faculty, and guest faculty, Writing Practices seminars, guided fieldwork residencies, and personalized faculty mentorships. You’ll join a community of writers invested in multi-modal experimentation and a rigorous study of literary arts.
As a part of our Writer at Large program, annual Michael Mahoney Memorial Reading, and Writing Activisms series, you’ll meet emerging and renowned writers at on-campus readings and workshops. Your studies will culminate in the creation of full-length manuscript, with the freedom to incorporate multimedia, performance-based, or collaborative elements.
The Experience
Pratt Campus and Classroom photos.
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. Pratt’s M.F.A. in Writing can be completed in four semesters of full-time study.
Courses are offered on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, in our studio space in Cannoneer court, which is open to writing students 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Writing Studio
You’ll participate in a weekly Writing Studio with students, faculty and guest participant for collective critique, as well as one-to-one guided mentorships with faculty members. Research opportunities and facilities
Mentored Studies
In your first semester, you will be assigned a faculty mentor with whom you will be in regular conversation throughout your time in the program. This mentor will attend your critiques and ultimately become your thesis advisor. Past mentors include Anna Moschovakis, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Mirene Arsanios, Ellery Washington, and James Hannaham.
Publishing Collective
Each year, under the guidance of a faculty advisor, a self-selecting group of MFA students collaborates to solicit, edit, design and publish chapbooks by students enrolled in the program. These publications are celebrated in a culminating event, and are also distributed at local Brooklyn bookstores.
Guided Fieldwork Residencies
Through guided fieldwork you’ll carry out an ongoing creative residency in collaboration with an outside social, cultural, and literary institution, community, organization, archive, or activist group. Past fieldwork sites include Wendy’s Subway, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and The Poetry Project. Industry Connections and Internships.
Our Faculty
Pratt’s distinguished faculty of outstanding creative professionals and scholars share a common desire to develop each student’s potential and creativity to the fullest. Bringing different views, methods, and perspectives they provide a rigorous educational model in which students make and learn. See all Writing faculty and administrators.
Pratt’s distinguished alumni are leaders in an array of fields. They publish widely and have been awarded numerous prestigious literary prizes. Their innovative work addresses critical social and political questions that reimagine our world.
Where They Work
Jive Poetic, Friday Night Curator, Nuyorican Poets Café
Erika Hodges, Law Clerk, Orleans Public Defender’s Office
Join us at Pratt. Learn more about admissions requirements, plan your visit, talk to a counselor, and start your application. Take the next step.
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.
Cannoneer has a new record player (which also has a tape deck, radio, and more), plus a collection of wonderful poetry-inflected records by Moor Mother, Tongo Eisen-Martin (@_tongogara_), Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Douglas Kearney (@douglas.kearney), John Ashbery, Eileen Myles, and Harmony Holiday via @fonografeditions! Stop by and have a listen 🎶
Applications are open for Pratt Berlin Spring 25!
Deadline September 15th. See link in bio or head over to the Pratt Study Abroad website to apply.
From WR Pratt Berlin alum Sophie Cobb: “Studying in Berlin was nothing short of life-altering. Living, writing, and coming of age in Berlin enriched my relationship with myself, my art practice, gifted me with deep, lifelong connections, and offered me the confidence to build my life wherever the wind takes me. Alongside the city of Berlin, my instructors made this one of the most rewarding semesters of my college career. Be careful! You may even come back to America with a long distance love. Berlin is full of discovery, surprise, and opportunity for exponential growth.”
Seats for children’s book writing are open for fall 2024!
This course will focus on writing a timeless story that will appeal to children and resonate with adults. Through exercises, in-class assignments, and the workshop method, students will mine their lives and imaginations for a story that will enchant and empower children; a story that will provoke discussion stemming from the adult and child’s shared experience. Students will discover the importance of brevity, pattern and cadence, and how to create writing that inspires, supports, and enhances imagery. This course will also offer avenues for submitting stories to agents and editors for those interested in publishing.
Open elective for fall 2024: First Books!
How do very different bodies of work take shape as a thing we might call “book”? How does any body of work go from states variously and temporarily known as “manuscript” or “thesis” or pile of work become a thing? These are questions that often only have variable, multiple, and idiosyncratic answers. And so in this elective we will read around in a handful of books to check out how certain poets took up and answered, so to speak, these questions. Poets to read will include but not be limited to: John Wieners, Layli Long Soldier, Claire Meuschke, Hoa Nguyen, Simone White, Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, Charles Theonia, Solmaz Sharif, CAConrad and various others.
Anika Levy’s Writers Studio IV class gave an incredible reading tonight at Dear Friend Books. Thank you all for sharing your work 🩵
(DM us if you’re not tagged and want to be! We did not know everyone’s usernames.)
The graduate program in Writing consists of several core classes and seminars taken over four semesters (two years), with the goal of producing a final manuscript, performance, or collaborative event. Notable features of the Pratt MFA in Writing include:
The Writing Studio, a weekly collective interdisciplinary critique forum inclusive of all students, faculty, and guest faculty;
One-to-one guided mentorships with faculty members;
Guided fieldwork residencies invite students to carry out an ongoing creative residency in collaboration with an outside social, cultural, and literary institution, community, organization, archive, or activist group;
Special Topics seminars in literature, media studies, performance, translation, small press, and experimental writing traditions;
Writing Practices seminars, research and discussion-based classes covering the history and theory of collaborative and engaged writing practices; and
A course of study stressing a writing process that takes into account the material and technological aspects of writing, the human body that produces it, and the larger social, sexual, historical, economic, racial, and cultural contexts in which and through which all imaginative writing takes place.
1.CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT
Students will be able to understand, analyze, critique and participate in the processes of knowledge
production.
2.SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
Students will be able to analyze cultural phenomena and include in their writing practice an engagement
with social issues, such as social justice, economic justice, gender equality.
3.COLLABORATION
Students will show a critical and practice-based interest in and creative facility with alternate modes of
authorship, such as collaborative modes of thinking, making and organizing.
4.AESTHETIC EXPERIMENTATION
Students will demonstrate a critical understanding of and/or engagement with aesthetic experimentation,
especially as it relates to create new modes of thinking and making and dwelling (sociality, community).
5.INTERDISCIPLINARITY
Students will be able to create texts, performances, video, etc., that cross or combine various creative
genres and media (disciplines).
