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.
Ekphrastic Performance Night – Friday, April 18, 7pm
Are you a musician, performance poet, sound poet, oral storyteller, or any other type of performer, in addition to being part of Pratt’s Writing or Fine Arts community—including faculty? If so, sign up here to share work and hang out with people from both programs on Friday, April 18 from 7–9pm in ARC*E-02.
The only rule is that the piece you share has to be inspired by another work of art! (Not necessarily a work of visual art, we’re defining ekphrastic pretty loosely here.) Questions? Concerns? Email jhannaha@pratt.edu. Let James know if you want to be the host!
SIGN UP at https://www.google.com/url?q=http://docs.google.com/document/d/13z5dT5ekpR1Mq661oYPLlnYeytsItjOfGl-BS30HXQg/edit?tab%3Dt.0&source=gmail-imap&ust=1743511079000000&usg=AOvVaw3bd2k6Ef342rEGO66OKxO7
The show can’t go all night—earliest signers get priority!
Happy Tuesday Takeover! We hope everyone had a restful and joyous spring break! This week Anna and I are sharing our current reads. Keep reading for information on our Admitted Students discord page!
Anna: My current read is Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare! Having recently just begun rehearsals for @prattinstitutetheatre production of Twelfth Night as assistant director, I have been revisiting this text over and over again. For any Shakespeare lovers or people wanting to get into Shakespeare, I highly recommend this play! (Or if you just love drama and love and gossip and comedy, it really has so much to love). I also highly recommend that you come and see our show of Twelfth Night in early May!!🎭🤗
Hadley: I just started reading Sally Rooney’s fourth book, Intermezzo. I first read and fell in love with Sally Rooney when I was in Pratt’s PreCollege program back in 2021 (if you know someone interested in the PreCollege program please feel free to DM me @hadleyuribe._)! Intermezzo follows two brothers in the wake of their father’s death. It’s about grief, family, love.
ALSO: ‼️ATTENTION RECENTLY ADMITTED STUDENTS‼️
Be sure to check your emails for an invite to our Admitted Students discord page run by myself @annakateavent, @sarina_g2, and @brookeomillerrr. On this discord you have the opportunity to talk with fellow admitted students and ask any and all questions you may have about Pratt, the writing department, or NYC. We hope to chat with you there!
Cool event at Baruch, march 27th at 5pm! More details below:
You are warmly invited to join us for this semester’s Harman reading and conversation with our current writer-in-residence, Edel Rodriguez. The event will be hosted by the Harman Program and Latinx Visions, a podcast that explores Latinx culture and media. The podcast’s hosts, Profs. Rojo Robles, Rebecca Salois, and Jennifer Carrocio Maldonado, will be interviewing Rodriguez.
Rodriguez’s graphic memoir, Worm, is at once a personal exploration about his artistic journey and a tale of immigration from Cuba to the United States on the Mariel Boatlift. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Kirkus Reviews, and was awarded the American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Honor. He is also the author of four children’s books, most recently The Mango Tree / La Mata de Mango, an enchanting, illustrated story on the immigrant experience. Rodriguez’s political illustrations, characterized by an unflinching boldness, have appeared regularly on The New York Times and the New Yorker.
Edel Rodriguez will be introduced by Prof. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, Baruch Assistant
Professor of Black and Latino Studies (BLS).
Some images from @sarina.writes ’s open ended performance in Cannoneer last month, featuring work by Sarina as well as from fellow Pratt students Miles Albright, Sherry Lin, Megan Butler, and Rachel Genito.
Sarina’s curatorial statement below:
This performance was meant to allow artists the chance to “play with their artwork again. They all worked to the prompt of converting what is 2D to 3D or experiment with the boundaries of physical art, virtual, or other transitional forms. How can one transition from painting to poem? How can a work of art move fluidly throughout space without changing entirely what the original piece was. Or maybe it does change, but does that mean it has to be classified as a different artwork? Labeling & critique of artwork has created a kind of pressure to conform to one disciplinary or present in an acceptable style. Some photographers have expressed that a lot of their study requires knowing how to display photos in the “right way” rather than focusing too much on the details of the image. Art should be freeing and playful again. Thank you to all who participated.
@prattler is having its first Speakeasy March 29, Saturday, 7pm, @DGT Gallery House 272 Clinton Ave, Brooklyn NY. The event will feature live performances, including poetry or other creative writing readings, as well as acoustic music. A vending table will be available for artists selling their zines or other works. The space offers a chic dimly lit atmosphere with floor seating on pillows, creating an intimate and welcoming environment. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided along with free copies of the new Spring 2025 New York Minute Issue!
EDIT: postponed til April!
come eat some food and flip through some mags at our celebration of student publications on march 26th! This is a great opportunity to chat with the editors and creators of these publications if you’re interested in joining, or taking an associated class in the fall.
Happy Tuesday Takeovers! Today I talked to Sarina ( @sarina_g2 ) about Fieldwork.
Fieldwork is a course designed for BFA Writing students (and occasionally students from other departments) who choose to pursue an independent fieldwork project that relates to an area of professional or artistic development that they want to gain new skills and experience in. Fieldwork allows the student to design a semester-length project with the supervising instructor in light of the students’ goals, which otherwise aren’t reflected in an existing course or internship.
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).
