Undergraduate Program Director

The Undergraduate Creative Writing Program is part of the Writing Division of the School of the Arts. Students from all divisions of Columbia University -- as well as non-degree students -- may take our classes. General Studies degree candidates and Columbia College students may apply to major in creative writing.

The program offers workshops at the beginning, intermediate, advanced, and senior levels. We also offer craft seminars in creative writing that are designed to examine literature from a practitioner's perspective. While students develop and hone their literary technique in workshops, the creative writing seminars (which explore literary technique as well as history) broaden their sense of possibility by exposing them to the various ways, historically, that language has been used to make art. As a supplement to the workshops and seminars, related courses for the major can be drawn from any department.

The seminars are modeled on the courses offered by the graduate Writing Division, and provide the intellectual ballast that informs and deepens the work of the creative writing student. Students in the creative writing seminars read a book or a selection of works each week and engage in round-table discussions about the artistic attributes of the texts, in order to better understand how literature might be made. By engaging in a deep analysis of outstanding and diverse works of literature, the creative writer can build the resources necessary to produce his or her own accomplished creative work.

Columbia University has a remarkable tradition in the teaching of creative writing; since 1909, tens of thousands of undergraduate and nondegree students have studied writing with Columbia's distinguished faculty. Among the notable writers who have taught here are Lillian Hellman, Richard Howard, Stanley Kunitz, Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Spalding Gray, A.R. Gurney, Bharati Mukherjee, Phillip Lopate, Joyce Johnson, Zadie Smith, and Richard Ford.

Some former Columbia writing students who went on to noted literary careers are Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, Richard Yates, Evan S. Connell, Jr., and Heidi Julavits. Recent students who have published include Wells Tower, Karen Russell, Kiran Desai, Rivka Galchen, and Mark Wunderlich.

Graduate Program Director

The Columbia University MFA Writing Program is highly regarded for its rigorous approach to literary instruction and for its faculty of acclaimed writers and editors who are devoted and dedicated teachers. The faculty, the students, and the curriculum represent and foster a full range of artistic and literary diversity. Students are encouraged to make the most of their own artistic instincts and to realize as fully as possible, beyond any perceived limitations, their potential as writers.

At the core of the curriculum is the writing workshop. All workshops are small (7 to 12 students), ensuring that all students present work at least three times per semester. Students receive substantial written responses to their work from their professors and classmates; they also have regularly scheduled one-on-one conferences with faculty. The second-year thesis workshops (6 to 9 students) are dedicated to shaping each student's work into book form.

The Columbia MFA is a two-year program requiring 60 credits of course work to complete the degree and can take up to three years to complete the thesis. Students concentrate in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction, and also have the option of pursuing a joint course of study in writing and literary translation (see the LTAC web page on our website). Most MFA programs require 48 credits or as few as 36 credits, but the Columbia Writing Program considers the study of literature from the practitioner's point of view--reading as a writer--essential to a writer's education. Every semester, students take a workshop and, on average, three craft-oriented seminars and/or lectures designed to illuminate, inform, clarify, augment and inspire each student's experience and practice as a writer. New seminars, lectures and master classes are created every year.

The Writing Program also offers its students an array of extra-curricular programs, opportunities, events, and activities, including: several lecture series and one-day seminars with visiting writers; two student-run reading series; internships at The New Yorker, Publisher's Weekly, the Academy of American Poets, and other prominent NYC magazines, publishing houses, and literary organizations; the annual Thesis Anthology of second-year students' work sent to a national list of literary agents and editors, and an annual event bringing literary agents together with Program alumni and 3rd-year students; programs offered for students of color by the Our Word student group; and the new Word for Word international exchange program for students interested in literary translation. In addition to eligibility for 37 paid teaching assistantships, all students are offered the opportunity to teach at the high school or college level through the Columbia Artists/Teachers program as well as to work as paid creative writing instructors in the Summer High School program. Columbia: a Journal of Literature and Art is entirely student run, offering experience in editing and publishing a respected literary journal. Students can take full advantage of the vast academic resources of Columbia University, and are encouraged to take courses outside the Writing Program, whether in other programs of the School of the Arts or in the university at large. And of course, the infinitely rich cultural and literary landscape of New York City lies just outside the campus gates.