Welcome to the New School Writing Program
For over 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 (MFA) in Creative Writing with concentrations in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and writing for children. Through seven decades of persistent innovation, the New School Writing Program has welcomed a vivid and diverse who's who of essential American poets, novelists, and essayists, 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, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Recent faculty members include 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 originated our MFA in Creative Writing back in the mid-1990s, our aim was to assemble a faculty of distinguished and emerging writers that could serve as the contemporary equivalent of this distinctive past. Led by Director Robert Polito, a prize-winning biographer and poet, Fiction Coordinator Helen Schulman, and Poetry Coordinator David Lehman, the current New School graduate writing program faculty is, we submit, unmatched anywhere in the United States. Their detailed biographies appear elsewhere on this website, but even to list alphabetically our 2011-2012 faculty in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children is to intimate the richness and variety of modern 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, Dale Peck, Darryl Pinckney, Robert Polito, Jenny Quilter, Helen Schulman, Tor Seidler, Laurie Sheck, Darcey Steinke, Benjamin Taylor, Jackson Taylor, Craig Morgan Teicher, Susan Van Metre, Sarah Weeks, Brenda Wineapple, Stephen Wright and Tiphanie Yanique.
In addition to the MFA program in Creative Writing, the Writing Program offers an innovative writing curriculum for undergraduates - including the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy - as well as an outstanding array of online and on-campus writing workshops for continuing education students and degree students in the New School Bachelor's Program. Both in the classroom and through our public programs and readings, the New School Writing Program seeks to animate and intensify the writer's life. We invite you to learn more about the New School MFA in Creative Writing.
- Robert Polito, Director
- Jackson Taylor, Associate Director