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.
Next Tuesday, September 10th at 4:00pm, join us for an Open Mic & Mixer in Cannoneer, organized by our student representatives @annakateavent, @sarina_g2 & @brookeomillerrr 💜
Please join the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences for a reception during orientation week:
Tuesday, August 20th 4:30-6pm
DeKalb Gallery
(and courtyard weather permitting)
Hope to see you there! ☕️
New 320 elective for fall 2024 just dropped!
BODY HORROR: ABJECTION AS CRAFT
Through a diverse selection of creative works, revelatory prompts, and engaged discussion, students will collectively explore the possibilities of abjection, body horror, and the sensory as generative and analytical praxis. Students will unearth and excavate new ways to invoke and center the body through narrative design and experimentation with form. Throughout this course, students will be encouraged to uncover new approaches to their creative practice and spark the cultivation of new works and approaches to revision and craft. Participants will also learn how to incorporate artifacts, new media, and theory into their work to further excavate, channel, and conjure new thresholds and topographies within their writing. Together, we’ll uncover the narrative potential of what disturbs, rattles, and haunts. Students will engage with works by Natalie Diaz, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Claire Cronin, Jennifer Reeder, Audre Lorde, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, Michelle Garza Cervera, Rachel Yoder, Agustina Bazterrica, and more.
ACHTUNG!! Pratt Berlin Spring 25 Info Session!!
For all WR and F/V majors
Wednesday July 24 5pm
Zoom link: https://pratt.zoom.us/j/94061013522
For those of you interested in applying to Pratt Berlin for the spring 25 semester, there will be an info session on July 24th, at 5pm. A few alums of the program will join in order to offer tips and to share their experience in Berlin. If you’re thinking about applying, join us!
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.”
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).
