The NYU Creative Writing Program has distinguished itself for over thirty years as a leading national center for the study of writing and literature, inviting promising new writers to work closely with a faculty of today's finest writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
Low-Residency MFA Writers Workshop in Paris
That tradition continues with the low-residency MFA Writers Workshop in Paris, which offers students the opportunity to develop their craft under the guidance of internationally-acclaimed faculty—including Catherine Barnett, Ken Chen, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Freeman, Ishion Hutchinson, Uzodinma Iweala, Hari Kunzru, Katie Kitamura, Nick Laird, Robin Coste Lewis, Leigh Newman, Meghan O'Rourke, Matthew Rohrer, Nicole Sealey, Zadie Smith, Darin Strauss, and Brandon Taylor—while writing and studying in one of the world's most inspiring literary capitals.
Recent visiting writers and editors include Anne Carson, Rachel Cusk, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Davis, Mariana Enríquez, Melissa Febos, Terrance Hayes, Mira Jacob, Leslie Jamison, Donika Kelly, Etgar Keret, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Kushner, Raven Leilani, Ben Lerner, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, David Mitchell, Nadifa Mohamed, Maggie Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, ZZ Packer, Claudia Rankine, Taiye Selasi, Kamila Shamsie, Brenda Shaughnessy, Leila Slimani, Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Kevin Young, among many others.
The MFA Writers Workshop in Paris constitutes an intimate creative apprenticeship that extends beyond traditional classroom walls.
Over two years, students and faculty convene regularly in Paris for five intensive ten-day residency periods held biannually in January and July (click here for a sample residency calendar). While in residency in Paris, students participate in a vibrant community engaged in all aspects of the literary arts, including workshops, craft talks, lectures, individual conferences and manuscript consultations, as well as a diverse series of readings, special events and professional development panels. The city of Paris itself—with its literary history and rich cultural attractions—provides an ideal opportunity for students to learn the art and craft of writing, immerse themselves in the creative process, and live the writer’s life.
During the intervals between residencies, students pursue focused courses of study, completing reading and writing assignments under the close supervision of individual faculty members. These ongoing dialogues with faculty are tailored to specific student interests and needs; students are mentored by a different professor each term and work closely with four different writers during the two-year program.
Unlike the traditional MFA, the low-residency program offers both freedom and rigor, balancing the intense and stimulating community of each residency and the sustained solitary work completed in the intervals between. Students are expected to complete substantial writing and reading assignments each term, regularly submitting packets of work in exchange for detailed feedback and critique. Graduating students leave the program with four new literary mentors and a portfolio of letters written by acclaimed writers in response to their work.
In order to receive the MFA, students must attend five residencies, successfully complete 32 credits of coursework, and submit a special project of at least 70 pages of fiction or creative nonfiction, or 25 pages of poetry. This project consists of a substantial piece of writing—a novel, a collection of short stories, a memoir or essay collection, or a group of poems—submitted before the final residency. The project requires the approval of the student's faculty advisor and the program director.
FACULTY MEMBERS INCLUDE:
Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her most recent collection, Human Hours, was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press and received the Believer Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), which received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for an outstanding second book. Barnett has taught at Barnard, Princeton, and Hunter, and is currently a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU.
Ken Chen was a 2019-2020 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where he worked on his book Death Star. The hybrid nonfiction book follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. He was the 2009 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his book Juvenilia, which was selected by the poet Louise Glück. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf writers Conference, he has published nonfiction in Best American Essays, N+1, The New Republic, Frieze, The New Inquiry, Poetry, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Chen served as the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008 to 2019 and co-founded Culturestrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice.
Nathan Englander's most recent novel is kaddish.com. He is also the author of the Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (all published by Knopf/Vintage). He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for What We Talk About. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Esquire, among other places. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories, including 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Translated into twenty-two languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. In 2012 Englander's translation of the New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door and Fly Already, published by FSG. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012, and his new play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of a 2019 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and the 2020 Blanche and Irving Laurie Theatre Visions Fund Prize, was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater and was supposed to be running at The Old Globe in San Diego right now—sigh. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestselling novel Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize. His other novels include Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and, most recently, Here I Am. He is also the author of the nonfiction books, Eating Animals, and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). Foer was one of Rolling Stone's "People of the Year" and Esquire's "Best and Brightest,” and was included in The New Yorker magazine's "20 Under 40" list of writers. He lives in Brooklyn.
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor of The Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist, The Tyranny of E-mail, and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as two collections of poems, Maps and The Park. He has also edited a trilogy of anthologies on inequality, including Tales of Two Americas and Tales of Two Planets. His work is translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he is Artist in Residence at New York University.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
Uzodinma Iweala is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and medical doctor. He is the CEO of The Africa Center in New York, promoting a new narrative about Africa and its diaspora through a focus on culture, policy and business. Uzodinma is the Co-Founder of Ventures Africa Magazine, a publication that covers business, policy, culture and innovation spaces in Africa. He is a member of the Presidents Youth Advisory Group (PYAG) for Jobs for Youth Africa (JfYA) at the African Development Bank (AfDB). He is also on the Board of the NewNow, a subsidiary of the Virgin Group’s charitable arm, Virgin Unite. He has written three books: Beasts of No Nation (2005), a novel also adapted into a major motion picture; Our Kind of People (2012), a non-fiction account of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria; and Speak No Evil (2018), a novel about Washington, D.C.
Katie Kitamura is the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her third novel, A Separation, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori. It was named a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen publications, translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted for film. Her new novel, Intimacies, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2021.
A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Hari Kunzru is a Clinical Professor in the Creative Writing Program. He holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University. He is the author of five novels, most recently White Tears, a finalist for the PEN Jean Stein Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, One Book New York, the Prix du Livre Inter étranger, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His novel Red Pill will be published in September 2020 by Knopf. He is also the author of The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men and a short story collection, Noise. His novella Memory Palace was presented as an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. His short stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Guardian, New York Review of Books, Granta, Bookforum, October and Frieze. He has written screenplays, radio drama, and experimental work using field recordings and voice-to-text software. He has taught at Hunter College and Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He is a past deputy president of English PEN, a judge for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and has been a frequent presenter, interviewer and guest on television and radio.
Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1975 and educated at Cookstown High School and Cambridge University. He is the author of the novels Modern Gods, Utterly Monkey, Glover's Mistake, and Feel Free, and three books of poems, Go Giants, To a Fault and On Purpose. The recipient of many prizes for his poetry and fiction, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, the Betty Trask Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Prize, he has lived in London, Warsaw, and Rome. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Deborah Landau is the author of four collections of poetry: Soft Targets (winner of the 2019 Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her other awards include a Jacob K Javits Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR's All Things Considered, and included on "Best of 2015" lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition was published by Valparaiso Edicíones in 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and The Best American Poetry, and included in anthologies such as Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women's Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Robin Coste Lewis is the author of the book of poems Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She has had various work published in numerous publications, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition, and VIDA. She obtained her MFA from NYU's Creative Writing Program.
Leigh Newman's memoir about Alaska, Still Points North (Dial, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize. Her short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s, One Story, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. She is the winner of the Paris Reviews’s 2020 Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” and her story “Howl Palace” was selected for 2019 Best American Short Stories, as well as won the 2020 Pushcart prize and the Paris Review’s ASME-winning award for fiction. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Vogue, O The Oprah Magazine, and other magazines. She has taught creative writing at Pratt, Sarah Lawrence, and New York University and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Breadloaf, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the former books editor of Oprah.com, the co-founder of Black Balloon/Catapult Publishing, and is now the senior editor-at-large at Catapult. Soon to come: the story collection Nobody Gets out Alive (2022) and an untitled novel (2023) from Scribner.
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead, 2011) as well as the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain's Forward First Book Prize. Her most recent collection, Sun in Days, appeared in September 2017. She was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism, among other prizes. She is the poetry editor of T Magazine and formerly an editor at The New Yorker, Slate, and The Paris Review. Her essays and poems have appeared inThe New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and more. A graduate of Yale University, she teaches at Princeton and the NYU Creative Writing Program. She is the editor of The Yale Review and is currently working on a book about chronic illness.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017 Believer Book Award, Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. With Joshua Beckman and Anthony McCann he wrote the secret book Gentle Reader! It is not for sale. Octopus Books published his action/adventure chapbook-length poem They All Seemed Asleep in 2008. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994.
His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many journals. He's received the Hopwood Award for poetry and a Pushcart prize, and was selected as a National Poetry Series winner, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Recently he has participated in residencies/ performances at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle).
Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was raised in Oklahoma, and attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She received an MFA from New York University and an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida. Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. In 2019, Sealey was named a 2019-2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, the Cave Canem Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. She was the Executive Director at the Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019 and is the curator for a special series of Poem-a-Day from August 31–September 11, 2020. Sealey currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won The Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Award (Eurasia Section) and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Swing Time, was published in 2016. She is the editor of an anthology of short stories entitled The Book Of Other People and has published several collections of short stories including Martha and Hanwell (2005) and Grand Union (2019), as well as several collections of essays including Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free: Essays (2018). She was formerly the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine. Zadie Smith is a graduate of Cambridge University and has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She became a tenured professor of fiction at NYU in 2010 and lives between New York City and London.
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than it Hurts You, the NBCC-winning memoir, Half a Life, and the comic-book series, Olivia Twist. His new novel, The Queen of Tuesday—a mix of memoir and fiction that tells the story of Strauss' grandfather and Lucille Ball—is forthcoming from Random House (August, 2020). A recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Library Association Award, and numerous other prizes, Strauss has written screenplays for Disney, Gary Oldman, and Julie Taymor. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries, and he is a Clinical Professor at the NYU Creative Writing Program.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, as well as The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.
Program Dates (Upcoming Residencies): January 9 - 18, 2022 Housing: Students must arrange their own accommodations in Paris during the residency periods. TUITION & FEES Tuition for the program will be approximately $30,000 per year, not including registration fees. Tuition fees are subject to a yearly increase. Tuition for the upcoming 20-21 academic year can be calculated as follows:
Tuition per unit, per term: $1,928.00 |
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Registration fees (based on 16 units of tuition per year) are calculated based on the number of credits taken per term. Please click here for a chart detailing the cost of tuition and fees per unit.
Although departmental funding is not available, students may consult a list of external scholarships and grant opportunities here. |
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The next admissions cycle for the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris will begin around June 2021 when the application for the January 2022 residency will become available. Students may apply for either the MFA in Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, or Poetry. All applicants must submit online using the GSAS Application Form (for the “Spring 2022” term) only by September 15, 2021.
** No portion of the application should be mailed directly. The GRE is not a requirement for the program. For more information, including details on academics, housing, costs, and the application process, please contact the NYU Creative Writing Program at 212-998-8816 or creative.writing@nyu.edu.