Writing, MFA

Join a community of writers invested in experimentation and a rigorous study of literary arts. Deeply collaborative and transdisciplinary, our MFA in Writing offers you 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

Prospective candidates: RSVP for the MFA in Writing’s Fall 2025 informational session!

Here is the date and corresponding registration link:

Monday, December 8 at 5:00pm ET – Register here

Personalized Support to Develop Your Writing

Our tight-knit writing community values a plurality of voices and approaches to writing, both on and off the page. In our program, you’ll develop your writing practice through weekly Writing Studio sessions with peers, faculty, and guest artists; unique electives; guided fieldwork residencies; and faculty mentorships.

Pratt’s MFA 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.

A Transdisciplinary, Experimental, and Expansive Program Within an Art School

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.

Participate in small-size seminars with our faculty in subjects such as multilingualisms, small press, ecopoetics, and experimental prose. Take advantage of space in our curriculum to pursue courses in Pratt’s celebrated Art, Design, and Media Studies programs, or design your own custom independent study. Browse the full list of Writing MFA elective courses.

Writers Supporting Writers: Building a Collaborative Practice

Pratt’s Brooklyn campus-based writing facilities, designed with significant student input, include dedicated 24/7 work spaces where students can develop projects together as well as find quiet nooks for writing and reflection. The program’s faculty serve as models for collaborative practice as well, from co-leading the weekly Writing Studio to founding literary magazines and alternative presses that support other writers.

Socially Engaged Practice: Fieldwork Residencies

Explore writing’s impact with an organization you believe in. 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 Café, and The Poetry Project.

Become Part of a Publishing Collective

Each year, a self-selecting group of students collaborates to solicit, edit, design, and publish chapbooks. These publications are celebrated in a culminating event and are also distributed at local Brooklyn bookstores.

Pursue Independent Projects—with Funding

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

Work with a Mentor

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.

Our Faculty

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
Associate 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.

After Graduation

The program sets graduates up for success in a variety of fields. Our graduates publish widely and have been awarded prestigious literary prizes. Their innovative work addresses critical social and political questions that reimagine our world.

Where They’ve Worked

Nuyorican Poets Café
New Orleans Public Defender’s Office
Litmus Press
Futurepoem Books
School for Poetic Computation
Pratt Institute
JustMedia
Boar Hair Books and Oreades Press
The Octavia Project
Code Read
Nightboat Books and Graywolf Press

Publications and Awards

Andrew Riad’s Martyred, Mother: A Futurenarrative (winner of Radix Printing and Publishing Cooperative’s 2025 Megaphone Prize)
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 NewsHour, and BET
Irene Lee, co-author of Six Endings and Some Beginnings (Ordeas Press, 2022)

Success 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

Dedicated Career Support for Life

Your career journey doesn’t end at graduation. Our departmental alumni coordinator and Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development offer lifelong support, including one-to-one strategy sessions and reviews of résumés, cover letters, and websites.

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).

Ready for More?

HERE’S HOW TO APPLY	Graduate Studies at Pratt	OUR CAMPUS & BEYOND
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