Welcome to the New School Writing Program
For almost 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 fiction, poetry, 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. More recent faculty 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 started our MFA in Creative Writing back in the mid-1990s, our aim was to assemble a faculty of distinguished and emerging writers that accurately could be claimed 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 faculty is, we submit, unmatched anywhere in the United States. Their detailed biographies appear elsewhere on this website, but even to list alphabetically our 2009-2010 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, 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, Paul Violi, Sarah Weeks, Brenda Wineapple, and Stephen Wright.
In addition to the MFA program in Creative Writing, The New School also offers the innovative undergraduate Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, as well as an outstanding array of writing workshops for the general public, most of which may be taken on a credit or non-credit basis. Courses include foundational study and introductory, intermediate, and advanced workshops in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, writing for children, dramatic writing, criticism, and journalism and feature writing. Many of these courses are taught through The New School Online, our distance learning program.
Both in the classroom and through a program of distinguished visitors, the New School Writing Program seeks to animate and intensify the writer’s life.