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This small, highly personal two-year program confers Master of Fine Arts degrees in fiction, playwriting, and poetry. It offers single-discipline and inter-genre workshops, literature seminars, small-group reading tutorials, and one-on-one tutorials, all of which emphasize relationships between students and eminent faculty. Additionally, students have the opportunity to work on our literary journal, The Brooklyn Review, and give public readings and performances in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The program offers fellowships and prizes. Students may also teach undergraduate courses for the English Department.
Our graduates have had their work published widely and have won competitions sponsored by the Iowa Review, the Colorado Review, the Mississippi Review, and Zoetrope, among many others. They have had books published, received major prizes, founded presses and literary journals, and been included in numerous anthologies, including The Best New Young Poets, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, O. Henry, and Pushcart. Our playwrights have won Obie Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Pulitzer Prize; started theater companies; and had their plays produced in the United States and abroad.
The program information listed here reflects the approved curriculum for the 2025–26 academic year per the Brooklyn College Bulletin. Bulletins from past academic years can be found here.
Our small, highly personal two-year program confers a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing in fiction, poetry, or playwriting. The program offers single-discipline and inter-genre workshops, literature seminars, small-group reading tutorials, and one-on-one tutorials, which all emphasize relationships between eminent faculty members and students. Additionally, students have the opportunity to work on The Brooklyn Review and give public readings/performances in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The program offers some fellowships as well as prizes and a winter writing residency at the Espy Foundation in Oysterville, Washington. Students may also teach undergraduate courses for the English Department.
Our graduates have had their work published widely and have won competitions sponsored by the Iowa Review, the Colorado Review, the Mississippi Review, and Zoetrope. They have been included in The Best New Young Poets anthology and The Best American Short Stories. Our playwrights have won Obies, started theater companies, and had their plays produced here and abroad.
Applicants who have completed a bachelor’s degree with a minimum GPA of 3.00 satisfy the undergraduate requirements of this program.
Fiction and Poetry: Thirty pages of original fiction or 20 pages of original poetry must be submitted for evaluation.
Playwriting: One original full-length play or two or more original one-act plays must be submitted for evaluation.
Applicants who did not major in English or creative writing as undergraduates but whose manuscripts show unusual talent are considered for admission. Manuscripts should be submitted with other application documents via the online application website at the time of application. Applications are not considered for spring semester admission.
Foreign applicants for whom English is a second language are required to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) with a score of 650 on the paper-based test or 280 on the computer-based test or 114 on the internet-based test before being considered for admission.
General matriculation and admission requirements of Graduate Studies are in the chapter “Admission.”
Thirty-six credits are required for the degree: 24 credits in the respective creative writing specialization, plus 12 credits in literature courses.
Students choose a specialization in one of the following:
Students may substitute for no more than two such courses any two 7000-level courses from the departments of Art, History, Global Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Philosophy, Speech, Television, Radio and Emerging Media, or Theater, the Conservatory of Music, the School of Cinema, or another department with the approval of the deputy chairperson for graduate studies (these courses may also be taken through e-permits at other CUNY branches, including the Graduate Center, or through individual or small group tutorials).
Permission to register for any of these substitute courses may be required from the graduate deputy chairperson of the appropriate department.
A substantial manuscript must be submitted and filed according to instructions available from the deputy chairperson. Students concentrating in fiction or poetry must submit original creative writing, in publishable form, such as a novel or collection of stories or poems. Students concentrating in playwriting must submit a full-length play or a number of one-act plays, in producible form, that would constitute a theatrical production. In cooperation with the Theater Department, efforts are made to produce the student’s major work.
Students are urged to take one workshop, one tutorial, and one literature course each semester in order to complete the program in four semesters. A reading knowledge of a foreign language is strongly recommended.
Program Objective 1: Learn to read literature with a focus on the ways in which form serves content.
Program Objective 2: Use close reading effectively to identify literary techniques, styles, and themes.
Program Objective 3: Learn to read and comment constructively and critically on the creative writing of peers in the workshop context.
Program Objective 1: Demonstrate knowledge of literary tropes and techniques (for example: metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, word play, and sonic effects such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhythm, etc.)
Program Objective 1: Create original examples of creative writing that demonstrate complexity through attention to rhetoric, syntax and tone.
Program Objective 2: Comment and write cogently and persuasively about classmates’ writing in the workshop context.
Program Objective 3: Demonstrate the ability to respond to constructive criticism from instructor and peers by effectively revising writing assignments.
Program Objective 4: Demonstrate the ability to use the currently accepted conventions of standard English mechanics and grammar, with an eye toward how those standards can be stretched in order to achieve innovative modes of expression.
Program Objective 1: Learn how to research and seek out historical and contemporary literary voices relevant to their individual voice.
Program Objective 2: Make use of the opportunities that Brooklyn College and New York City afford by attending readings, plays, literary panel discussions, and submitting to literary magazines.
Written work (including poems/stories/plays, in-class writing exercises, short written reflections on literary techniques used by published writers, workshop responses for peers, revised writing samples, etc.)
Contributions to class discussions and workshops
Attendance at readings, panels, performances or a related research project (such as researching literary magazines/submitting one’s work); documented via written summary of the activity handed into instructor
Submit the following documents to the Office of Graduate Admissions:
Refer to the instructions at Graduate Admissions.
3149 Boylan Hall E: gminter@brooklyn.cuny.edu P: 718.951.5000 ext. 3651
Or contact:
222 West Quad Center 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210 E: grads@brooklyn.cuny.edu P: 718.951.4536
Mondays–Fridays, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
To make an appointment with a graduate admissions counselor, visit:
BC Admissions Appointment Tool
English 7910X to be taken in the first semester. English 7912X to be taken four times, but not more than once in any semester; English 7911X once in the second semester; English 7913X to be taken two times in the second year, but not more than once in any semester.
The M.F.A. fiction specialization at Brooklyn College is a two-year course that maintains an enrollment of 30 students. While every member of the ongoing and visiting faculty works according to their methods, we are united in our conviction that newer writers need a balance of encouragement and serious, thoroughly considered feedback.
The curriculum is designed sequentially. Students take a workshop every semester. The specialization typically offers two traditional short fiction workshops and one novel-writing workshop in the fall and three short fiction workshops in the spring. The novel-writing workshop is meant to address the particular needs of students who are writing novels and who would prefer to receive input on longer sections than a traditional workshop allows.
First-year students take a craft course in the short story in the fall and a reading seminar in the spring. The reading seminars, led by faculty members, discuss classic and contemporary literature from a writer’s point of view. If a traditional literature course is devoted, for instance, to understanding why Faulkner and García Márquez are considered great writers, the reading seminars are more concerned with how writers like Faulkner and García Márquez achieved their effects.
Second-year students take, along with their workshops, a one-on-one revisions/thesis tutorial in the fall and in the spring. The first is devoted to helping students with work that has already been discussed in their workshops, the second to helping them look over what they’ve done during their time at Brooklyn College, toward the completion of their theses. Both represent the specialization’s desire to give each student individual attention outside of the workshops.
We who teach in the fiction-writing specialization do so in part because we want not only to be useful to younger writers but to know them. We care about each student we admit. We are trying, to the best of our abilities, to maintain the M.F.A. program we wish had been available to us.
Over the course of the last decade, our graduates have published more than 50 books, including Helen Phillips’s The Need (Longlisted for the National Book Award); R.O. Kwon’s The Incendaries (National Bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Best First Book Prize); Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased (New York Times Bestseller; adapted for film starring Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, and Lucas Hedges); Jai Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World (Longlisted for the PEN Faulkner Award, winner of the National Jewish Book Award); Thomas Grattan’s The Recent East (Longlisted for the PEN Hemingway Award) and Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets (National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Bestseller).
English 7932X to be taken four times, but not more than once in any semester; English 7933X to be taken four times, but not more than once in any semester.
The playwriting specialization at Brooklyn College was started over 30 years ago by Jack Gelber, one of America’s most important experimental writers. Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney continued that tradition for a 20 year period, while seeking to embrace the widest definition of that concept. Now, Dennis A. Allen II and Sibyl Kempson are serving as interim leaders of this innovative course of study.
The playwriting specialization is dedicated to the proposition that writing for the theater is not a business of finished thought and dead rules. Rather, we endeavor to pursue kinds of writing that involve an ongoing conversation with theater of the past and (hopefully) the future. To this end, we encourage our M.F.A. playwrights to become students of the theater in every sense: to follow the current scene as well as study the classics from as many traditions as possible; to study the techniques of making theater as well as theory; and lastly, to become as well-read as possible in all the written arts, with special emphasis on what is most contemporary, most challenging, most alive. It is our conviction that each generation must reinvent a theater appropriate to the time; a theater the time deserves; a theater that refuses to settle for the merely tendentious, and the dreary dead hand of the already known.
We are looking for aspiring writers who follow the theater because they love theater and all that pertains to theatricality. Theatricality diversely considered, rotated in four-dimensional space. We are looking for writers unwilling to settle for less. We believe the gathering of diverse people, ideas, and cultures strengthens both our insights into the work we present on stage and our relationships with each other.
English 7922X to be taken four times, but not more than once in any semester; English 7923X to be taken four times, but not more than once in any semester.
Since its inception, the Brooklyn College Master of Fine Arts specialization in poetry has balanced a firm grounding in the history and tradition of the craft with cutting-edge experimental writing. Moderately priced and highly selective, this two-year specialization offers intensive workshops (limited to 10 students), private tutorials, and courses in the history and craft of the genre.
Attracting a diverse student body from all across the country, it has graduated such writers as John Yau, Sapphire, Paul Beatty, David Trinidad, Star Black, Karen Kelley, Tom Devaney, and Anselm Berrigan. Brooklyn’s “experimental tradition” is best exemplified by the late-modernist masters John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom taught in the specialization. Other teachers have included Mark Strand, William Matthews, Ann Lauterbach, Douglas Crase, David Shapiro, C. K. Williams, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Joan Larkin, and, more recently, Ron Padgett Joshua Clover, Marjorie Welish, and LaTasha N. Diggs.
At present, the permanent staff includes Julie Agoos, author of Echo Systems (2015), Property (2008), Calendar Year (1996), and Above the Land (1987), for which she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; Ben Lerner, author of The Lichtenberg Figures (winner of the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, a Lannan Literary Selection, and one of 2004’s best books of poetry, according to Library Journal), Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006, and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award), and Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon, 2010); and Mónica de la Torre, author of Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat, 2020), The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), Public Domain (Roof Books, 2009), and Talk Shows (Switchback Books, 2006).
Recent alumni of the M.F.A. poetry specialization have received such major recognitions as selection for The National Poetry Prize Series (Courtney Bush, i love information, selected by Brian Teare, NY: Milkweeds, 2023), the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry (Sahar Muradi, OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shahib Nye, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), and the 2022 APR/Honickman First Book Prize (Chelsea Harlan, Bright Shade, selected by Jericho Brown, Philadelphia: The American Poetry Review, 2022). Others have received international honors for poetry and journalism (Mohammed El-Kurd, RIFQA, Haymarket Books, 2022, Winner of The Calgary Peace Prize); for translation (Matthew Reeck, winner of the 2020 Albertine Prize for “Muslim”: A Novel, by Zahia Rehmani, Deep Vellum, 2019); for YA fiction (Victoria Bond, winner of the 2020 John Steptoe/Coretta Scott King New Talent Author Award for Zora and Me (trilogy), with illustrator TR Simon, MA: Candlewick Press, 2020, 2018, 2011); and for books on art (John Yau, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, Black Sparrow Press, 2023, deemed a “revelatory volume” by Publishers Weekly, among other ravishing reviews). Our alumni currently occupy major Fellowships at the New York Public Library (Alexandra Kamerling, 2023 NYPL Dance Research Fellow), and the Library of America (Susana Plotts-Pineda, 2023 Latino Fellow), and have written, directed, and premiered feature film documentaries (Jodie Childers, with Dan Messina, director and cinematographer of Down by the Riverside, 2023 World Premiere, Woodstock Film Festival; Tom Devaney, Bicentennial City, Green House Media, 2020). Recent and forthcoming publications include Claire DeVoogd, VIA (Winter Editions, 2023), Anselm Berrigan, Pregrets (Black Square Editions, 2021), Katherine Duckworth, Slow Violence (NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2023), Marcella Durand, To Husband Is to Tender (Black Square Editions, 2021), Tom Devaney, Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2020), Tom Haviv, Flag of No Nation (Jewish Currents, 2019), Gracie Leavitt, Livingry (Nightboat, 2018), Kennia Lopez, The Exodus (Tolson Books, 2020), Chime Lama, Sphinxlike (Finishing Line, 2023), Sharon Mesmer, Greetings from My Girlies Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015), Jed Muson, Commentary on the Birds (Rescue Press, 2023), Joshua Wilkerson, Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream, Beautiful Days Press, 2022), John Yau, Tell It Slant, Omnidawn, 2023); Charles Theonia, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax, Archway Editions (March, 2024), and Zohra Saed with Sahara Muradi, eds., One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2022).
For comprehensive application information and the link to the online application, visit the Admissions page.
In recent years, we have received approximately 500 applications for 15 spots in fiction, approximately 120 applications for 10 spots in poetry, and approximately 70 applications for five spots in playwriting.
Though it varies year to year, we plan to notify applicants in March and early April. We appreciate your patience.
No.
As per our Admissions page, “Applicants who do not meet course requirements but whose manuscripts show unusual talent are considered for admission.”
Yes, your 30-page fiction manuscript may come in any form you wish (short stories, excerpt(s) from a novel, flash fiction, or any combination of the above, up to 30 pages). We simply recommend that you send in whatever you think is your very strongest work.
You may format your poetry as you see fit. Please do not exceed 20 pages.
Your one- to two-page personal statement should serve as a way for us to get to know you and come to understand why you want to pursue an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College.
Your two recommendation letters should come from people familiar with your writing, such as professors, mentors, and/or employers.
They should be submitted online (this will be an option when you’re completing the online application). For more information, refer to the Supporting Documents page.
We require transcripts from all colleges and universities that you attended.
Transcripts must arrive in envelopes sealed by the institution’s registrar office. Your college institution should mail transcripts to the Brooklyn College Office of Admissions.
Yes (though please note that students who received degrees from universities in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom are exempt from this requirement). For all other international applicants, see more information about the required international transcript evaluation.
Once you have received a B.A. from a U.S. university, you no longer need to submit your TOEFL scores to apply to the M.F.A. program.
No, you may only apply to one genre per year.
Because of the large number of qualified applicants, we may not be able to accept very strong candidates, nor can we offer specific feedback on individual applications. Note that the manuscript is by far the most important element of the application. We encourage interested applicants to reapply in the future.
As per the Graduate Admissions Office website, “To reapply, you need to complete and submit a new graduate degree application. You do not need to resubmit any supporting documents (i.e. transcripts, letters of recommendation) if you applied within the last two years.” The $125 application fee is waived for re-applicants for up to one year. You must send a new personal statement and manuscript to the Department of English each time you reapply.
In most cases, prospective students are permitted to visit classes once they’ve been accepted into the program.
Because of the small size of our program, only students matriculated in our M.F.A. program may take our graduate creative writing classes.
The Brooklyn College Office of International Student Services will assist you with immigration issues, financial aid, and housing.
Up-to-date tuition information is available on the Bursar’s website.
Unlike other masters students, M.F.A. students take a nine-credit-per-semester load. Tuition should be calculated based on nine credits per semester.
Yes. In addition to the salary for teaching undergraduate composition, our graduate students are eligible to receive some departmental funding. There is no special application for this funding; all admitted students will be considered automatically. The Office of Financial Aid primarily helps students obtain federal student loans and, if they are eligible, Work-Study funding. All students must complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which can be submitted online.
Yes. Students who wish to teach while they are enrolled in the M.F.A. program, but who don’t have prior composition teaching experience at the college level, are required to take English 7506, Practicum in Teaching College-Level Composition (which counts toward the M.F.A. degree requirements as an elective). The course includes a tutor-internship in an instructor’s classroom. After completing 7506, students may be assigned to teach their own section of a composition course, English 1010 or English 1012. Students may teach for up to three years, starting while they are students in the program and continuing after they graduate. There are also teaching opportunities at other CUNY schools.
International students on F-1 Student Visas are permitted to work or teach up to 20 hours per week while they are in the program, and eligible to continue doing so, full-time, for one year after graduation, if the work is in the field for which they received the degree.
Health insurance is available via the New York State of Health Insurance Exchange, as per the Affordable Care Act, where you can search for insurance plans.
Brooklyn College is an integral part of the cultural and artistic energy of New York City. Our faculty members in the Department of English offer incomparable expertise and tremendous talent, and each brings a unique perspective to their teaching and mentoring in and out of the classroom.
Brooklyn College creative writing alumni have found employment with many organizations, including:
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