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 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
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.
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
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.
🐻🐻🐻Pratt Berlin alums talk about their impressions of Berlin. Rising 2nd & 3rd year WR majors and minors: applications for Spring 26 semester in Berlin are now open. Visit @pratt__berlin and click on link in bio to apply. Deadline: September 18.
We’re so happy to announce that Ross Gay will be the Writing Department’s 2025-2026 Writer at Large! Please stay tuned for more information over the next few weeks about Ross’s upcoming fall reading. Ross will also be visiting courses, and we’re excited that many of you will have the chance to engage with him in person.
Ross’s work spans forms and themes, and you can explore his writing online at rossgay.net.
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Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.
Pratt faculty members Claire Donato (@somanytumbleweeds) and Benjamin Krusling (@no_ig_benji) are reading together this Saturday, August 23rd at 5:00pm at @enochs.nyc in the city. Come check out a local reading series and celebrate the beginning of Virgo season! ♍️🔥💜
Studying abroad can be a profound and transformative experience, including at the level of cultural exchange. Yet many study abroad programs promote an experience that rarely moves beyond a simplistic cultural landscape. In Germany, that ends up being tours of beer breweries, visits to Oktoberfest, or a visit to the Brandenburg Gate for selfies.
At Pratt Berlin, however, we begin with different assumptions. First, that Germany, and Berlin specifically, is a multiethnic, multilingual space, with thriving Arabic, Turkish, Vietnamese, and African communities and cultural hubs (to name just a few), all of which are also German. Secondly, each semester students across their classes engage German culture and history in the most expansive way possible. Third, they not only learn German but discover new collaborations with Germans and other German students.
In Pratt Berlin’s Reporting the City class students collaborated with German students to produce a radio show and a lit mag (photo 1). Other classes featured German artist and writer Mosthari Hilal (author of Ugliness, photo 2) discussing, with Sinthujan Varatharajah, their book English in Berlin – Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society (photo 3), which interrogates the role of global english in advancing gentrification in Berlin.
Students also visit the little known Dong Xuan Center (photo 4), an enormous Vietnamese market, in the formally East neighborhood of Lichtenberg, while learning also of the history of Vietnamese Vertragsarbeiter (contract laborers) in the former GDR which brought tens of thousands Vietnamese laborers in the 80s. In the Fieldwork class, students intern with writers and artists living in Berlin, as well as cultural orgs. One student worked with a local Brazilian poet and activist on housing justice organizing in Berlin. Another student worked at The Pickle Bar (photo 5), an arts space founded by Slavs & Tartars that seeks to “address items of urgency in oral and cultural histories, language and gender studies across Eurasia (Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia).” & yes (last photo), students also go to Oktoberfest and have a blast! #prattberlin #prattstudyabroad
🐻🐻🐻Pratt Berlin alums on what they love about studying in Berlin. Rising 2nd & 3rd year WR majors and minors: applications for Spring 26 semester in Berlin are now open. Visit @pratt__berlin and click on link in bio to apply. Deadline: September 18.
🐻🐻🐻Pratt Berlin takeover: this week we'll be posting all things Berlin. Rising 2nd & 3rd year WR majors and minors, take note: applications for Spring 26 semester in Berlin are now open. Here Pratt Berlin alums talk about Berlin and the "real Berlin experience." Film by Haddie Webster. Visit @pratt__berlin and click on link in bio to apply. Deadline: September 18.
🐻🐻🐻A selection of readings over the years by Pratt Berlin Writing Studio students. End of the year readings have taken place at various galleries and bookstores and cafes in Berlin (final photo—after party), often in collaboration with other German writers (first photo: ROT: a collaborative magazine created by Freie Universität German student writers and Pratt writers). 🐻🐻🐻2nd and 3rd year students: applications open to spend Spring 25 in Berlin. 🐻🐻🐻Visit @pratt__berlin and click the application link in the bio. 🐻🐻🐻Deadline: Sept. 18
🐻 Applications are now open to spend your Spring 26 Semester in Berlin!
🐻 BFA Writing majors/minors in their 2nd or 3rd year are welcome to apply to spend a semester in one of Europe’s most literary and legendary cities.
🐻 Pratt Berlin offers a full 16 credit menu of classes, including core WR studios and seminars.
🐻 As one recent alum wrote: "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."
🐻 Visit Pratt Study Abroad to apply. DEADLINE: Sept 18. #prattberlin #prattinberlin #prattstudyabroad #prattwriting
Writer’s Forum, a one-credit course, will be taught this fall by Prof. Fulla Abdul-Jabbar. Seats are still available and open to *all* Pratt students. Register today! 🪑
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).
