Writing, MFA

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.

A diverse group of people sit on stage as they each read from papers they are holding in their hands. They all have microphones in front of them.

Type: Graduate, MFA
Start Term: Fall Only
Credits: 39
Duration: 2 Years
Courses: Plan of Study
School and Department: School of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Writing

Student walking through Library hallway.

Writing at Pratt

Through weekly Writing Studio sessions with peers, faculty, and guest artists, writing practices seminars, unique electives, guided fieldwork residencies, and personalized faculty mentorships, you’ll join a community of writers invested in transdisciplinary experimentation and a rigorous study of literary arts.

Our program supports your development of 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.

The Experience

student in library, reading books, doing possible research

Transdisciplinary, 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.

The program resides on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, where Writing students enjoy dedicated 24/7 work spaces with desks, comfortable furniture, computers, free printing, art supplies, and a library of faculty, student, and alumni publications.

Pratt’s M.F.A. in Writing can be completed in four semesters of full-time study. We fund our students equally: for more information about student funding resources, please contact the program.

The Writing Studio

The Writing Studio lives at the center of our curriculum. Meeting weekly and co-led by collaborative faculty, studio is a scene for collective reading, study, inquiry, and critique. Breaking from traditional workshop norms, studio is a space of cross-genre, multimodal practice and experiments in pedagogy. Studio also includes our revision lab, in which a faculty member meets one-to-one with each student for post-critique reflection and manuscript review.

Mentored Studies

Through our Mentored Studies sequence, you and a faculty mentor will engage in regular, deep conversations throughout your time in the program. Your mentor will support the expansion of your writing practice and facilitate your thesis project. Past mentors include Anna Moschovakis, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Mirene Arsanios, Ellery Washington, and James Hannaham.

Electives

You’ll participate in fascinating, small-sized seminars with our faculty in subjects such as multilingualisms, small press, ecopoetics, and experimental prose. You can also take advantage of space in our curriculum to pursue courses in Pratt’s celebrated art, design, and media studies programs, or to design your own custom independent study. Browse the full list of Writing MFA elective courses.

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.

Fieldwork Residencies and Research Opportunities

Through the fieldwork course sequence you’ll study social practice methodologies and carry out a self-designed creative residency in collaboration with a literary institution, community organization, archive, or activist group of your choice. Past fieldwork sites include Wendy’s Subway, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and The Poetry Project.

MFA Writing students also frequently pursue individual research projects supported by the program and by Pratt’s Graduate Student Engagement Fund. With GSEF support our students have mounted gallery exhibitions, shot films, and traveled internationally to develop research archives for their creative projects.

The Thesis

Supported by your mentor, thesis advisor, and other faculty readers, your studies will culminate in the creation of a full-length manuscript, with the freedom to incorporate multimedia, performance-based, or collaborative elements.

Our Faculty

The Writing MFA faculty work as a pedagogical collective to support your writing process and goals. Distinguished and daring writers, artists, researchers, translators, and editors, they bring diverse views, methods, and perspectives to creating the environment in which you’ll study and create. See all Writing faculty and administrators.

Christian Hawkey
Professor
Christopher Perez
Visiting Professor
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Assistant Professor
Laura Elrick
Associate Professor
Anna Moschovakis
Adjunct Associate Professor – CCE
James Hannaham
Professor
Youmna Chlala
Professor
Mirene Arsanios
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Rachel Levitsky
Professor
Ellery Washington
Associate Professor
Hannah Assadi
Visiting Instructor

A group of people stand in front of a projector screen as they attentively look at book being held by the person in the middle.

Our Alumni

Pratt’s distinguished alumni are leaders in an array of fields. They publish widely and have been awarded 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
Alysia Slocum Laferriere, Editorial Fellow, Litmus Press
Ahana Ganguly, Assistant Editor, Futurepoem Books
Mahogany L. Browne, Executive Director, JustMedia
Irene Lee, Co-Founder, Boar Hair Books and Oreades Press
a.Monti, Editor at Litmus Press
Angela Abiodun, Program Manager, The Octavia Project
Zora Iman Crew, actor in The Daphne Project (2021), Planet X (2018) and The Legends of Sleepy Hollow (2021)

Publications and Awards

Alisha Mascarenhas, author of A Catalogue of Risk (Wendy’s Subway, 2024), winner of the Carlyn Bush Award
Stephon Lawrence, author of u know how much i hate being in social situations (Futurepoem, 2023)
Hamid Roslan, author of parsetreeforestfire (Ethos Books, 2019), Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize for Poetry 2020
Mahogany L. Browne, author of Woke Baby (2018, Macmillan) Chrome Valley: Poems (National Geographic Books, 2023), Vinyl Moon (Penguin, 2022), and others
a.Monti, author of Mycelial Person (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021)
Jive Poetic, showcased on TVONE’s Lexus Verses and Flow, PBS News Hour, and BET
Irene Lee, co-author of Six Endings and Some Beginnings (Ordeas Press, 2022)

Our Stories

Author James Hannaham reads from a red book in a narrow venue lit in orange-red tones

Literary City

Prattfolio Story

Installation by Cassandra Bristow, BFA Writing ’22

New Writing Studios Offer Space to Create and Collaborate

Article

Samantha Hunt walks across a green yard toward a writing studio with a breezeway in the center, where her dog is jogging through

Revisited: From the Studio of Writing Professor Samantha Hunt

Prattfolio Story

Ready for More?

HERE’S HOW TO APPLY	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.	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.

From the Catalog

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).