Message from The Chair...

Ben Marcus, Chair

The MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts is driven by a rigorous approach to literary instruction, and a faculty that is deeply committed to the work of its students. We seek students looking to deepen their artistic practice, who want to participate in a thriving, diverse community of writers.

At the core of our curriculum is the writing workshop, a course designed to expose student writers to a range of challenging critical responses to their work. The program does not favor any particular literary style, but rather encourages students to pursue writing that resonates most deeply with their own artistic instincts. We hope to provide an atmosphere that allows for full artistic exploration, and honest, substantive critical dialogue.

In addition to our workshops, we offer over twenty seminars, lectures, and master classes each year. These are reading courses for writers-rather than critical courses for scholars-designed to stimulate provocative discussions about literary craft and artistic choices. Master Classes give students the opportunity to enroll in four-week courses with visiting professors on a range of topics. Among our recent Master Class faculty are Helen Vendler, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, James Wood, Richard Ford, Han Ong, Susan Choi, Hilton Als, and Jonathan Ames.

The full-time Writing Division faculty actively publishes books that have been translated all over the world, and their work regularly appears in such venues as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Poetry, The Believer, and Bomb. The faculty have been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many other prestigious organizations.

In addition to the full-time faculty, the Writing Division employs many prestigious writers as adjunct faculty, who teach workshops, seminars, and lectures. Among the recent and scheduled adjunct faculty are Richard Ford, Gary Shteyngart, James Wood, Brenda Wineapple, Susan Choi, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Adam Haslett, Jessica Hagedorn, Phillip Lopate, Marie Howe, Mark Wunderlich, Eamon Grennan, Victoria Redel, Paul LaFarge, Maureen Howard, David Gates, Marjorie Welish, Darcy Steinke, Francisco Goldman, Darcy Frey, David Ebershoff, and Major Jackson.

Please take a look around the site and learn more about our program. Our courses page shows past and current offerings. If you have any questions at all about the program, please send us a note.