The New School

MFA Program

See writers who attended this program
Program Established: 
1996
Location: 
New York, NY
Genre: 
Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Translation, Cross-Genre
Residency: 
Full
Duration: 
2 Years
Incoming Class Size: 
80
Application Deadline: 
January 15, 2024
Application Fee: 
$50
Contact Name: 
Lori Lynn Turner
Core Faculty Includes: 

Poetry: J. Mae Barizo, Mark Bibbins, Elaine Equi, Robert Polito, Laurie Sheck

Fiction: Marie Helene Bertino, Ann Hood, Sidik Fofana, Shelley Jackson, Mira Jacob, Luis Jaramillo, Alexandra Kleeman, James Lasdun, Dale Peck, John Reed, Helen Schulman, Darcey Steinke

Nonfiction: Susan Cheever, Zia Jaffrey, Suzannah Lessard, Honor Moore, Brenda Wineapple

Writing for Children and Young Adults: Coe Booth, Caron Levis, Emily X.R. Pan, Andrea Pinkney

Funding/Employment Opportunities: 

The program offers partial funding through scholarships, as well as teaching, research, and program assistantships.

Affiliated Publications/Publishers: 
Other Features: 

The New School invites you to join a community of diverse writers, become part of New York City’s publishing world, and build a network of support on campus and beyond. Our prestigious MFA Creative Writing program is designed to help you develop your writing in workshops and literature seminars led by internationally-recognized faculty and renowned authors.

As an MFA student at The New School, you can choose your concentration in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, or Writing for Children and Young Adults and receive personalized faculty mentorship and faculty and peer critiques. Innovative courses in publishing and multimedia storytelling engage you in the development of literature. Popular graduate minors include Impact Entrepreneurship and Transmedia and Digital Storytelling. Or you can apply to WriteOn NYC!, a New School–funded fellowship program providing MFA students with high-quality teaching experience in area middle schools and high schools. All students benefit from evening classes and events, which enable them to work or attend to responsibilities during the day while enrolled in a full-time program.

The Writing for Children and Young Adults track is one of the premiere and most prestigious MFA tracks of its kind. 

Graduates: 

Each year, alumni of the MFA program write, edit, and publish essays, poems, and short stories in literary journals and magazines—from indie houses to the most prominent venues of the moment. Our graduates are celebrated writers, authors, editors, publishers, educators, and media and arts professionals.

Our graduates are publishing upwards of forty books a year, and it would be impossible to cite them all or choose among them. Please see our blog or our website’s “Outcomes” section for a sense of the breadth of our alumni and faculty accomplishments.