For more than 80 years, The New School has been a vital center for writing and the instruction of writing. Since 1996, The New School has offered the master of fine arts degree (MFA) in creative writing, with concentrations in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and writing for children. The School of Writing also offers an innovative curriculum for undergraduates, including the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy and an extensive program of on-campus and online writing workshops for both continuing education students and undergraduates in the New School Bachelor’s Program. The School of Writing also offers an extensive program of readings and other literary public events. In the classroom and through our public programs, the New School writing program seeks to animate and intensify the writer’s life.
Through decades of persistent innovation, the New School writing program has welcomed a vivid and diverse who’s who of American poets, novelists, and essayists, including, from past to present, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Leroi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Kay Boyle, May Sarton, Horace Gregory, Marguerite Young, William Goyen, Richard Yates, John F. Bardin, Edward Hoagland, David Ignatow, Alfred Kazin, Anatole Broyard, Carolyn Kizer, Daniel Halpern, Carol Muske Dukes, Gilbert Sorrentino, and, more recently, Hilton Als, Pearl London, Hayes Jacobs, Hugh Seidman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bernadette Mayer, David Trinidad, David Markson, Bob Holman, David Rosenberg, Nicholas Christopher, Jason Shinder, Susan Wheeler, Peter Carey, and Liam Rector.
When we launched the MFA in creative writing, our aim was to assemble a faculty of established and emerging writers that could serve as the contemporary equivalent of our distinguished past. To list alphabetically the current MFA faculty is to intimate the richness and variety of contemporary American literature: Jeffery Renard Allen, Robert Antoni, Catherine Barnett, Susan Bell, Mark Bibbins, Susan Cheever, Jonathan Dee, Elaine Equi, David Gates, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Ann Hood, Shelley Jackson, Zia Jaffrey, Hettie Jones, James Lasdun, David Lehman, Suzannah Lessard, David Levithan, Phillip Lopate, Patrick McGrath, Honor Moore, Sigrid Nunez, Meghan O’Rourke, Dale Peck, Darryl Pinckney, Robert Polito, Helen Schulman, Tor Seidler, Laurie Sheck, Darcey Steinke, Benjamin Taylor, Jackson Taylor, Craig Morgan Teicher, Susan Van Metre, Paul Violi, Sarah Weeks, Brenda Wineapple, and Stephen Wright. Their biographies appear elsewhere on this website.