Writing, M.F.A.

The Graduate Program in Writing M.F.A. 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.

There are three notable features of the new program. First, the heart of the program is a once-a-week core class, the Writing Studio, which is an open, democratic forum dedicated to the collective critique and discussion of student and faculty works in progress. Second, each student is offered one-on-one guided Mentorships with a chosen faculty member. Third, the program provides students with support and guidance to extend their cultural production and research interests into the the world in the form. Fieldwork Residencies: on-going residencies conducted in collaboration with an outside institution, community, organization, archive, occupational domain, or activist group. To see a growing list of our alliances with outside organizations and groups, see Alliances.

Notable features of the Pratt M.F.A. in Writing include:

• A weekly collective interdisciplinary critique forum inclusive of all students, faculty, and guest faculty.
• One-on-one guided Mentorships with faculty members of your choosing.
• Guided Fieldwork Residencies in a wide array of occupational domains, local communities, and institutions that focus on social and environmental justice, media interventions, education, science, health and human services, institutional or vernacular archives, animal rights, and local and global activism.
• Special Topics Seminars in Literature, Media Studies, Performance, and Experimental, Collaborative, and Engaged Writing traditions.
• Student-led collaborative Writing Practice Seminars that explore the intersections of writing, research, activism, radical pedagogy, and critical theory.
• Sustained focus on 21st-century modes of authorship including: activism, transdisciplinary and cross-genre experiment, performance, innovative uses of new media, investigative and research techniques, conceptual frameworks, collaborative methods, and site-specific approaches.
• 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.
• A supportive community that will continue to support artistic practice past the two years of M.F.A. study.