hunter college mfa in creative writing

CRWRTG-MFA - Creative Writing

Official name of program, department(s) sponsoring program, degree designation, nysed program code.

Hunter’s Creative Writing MFA is a highly selective program in which students work closely with distinguished writers to perfect their writing skills. The course comprises workshops, craft seminars, one-on-one supervisions with faculty, and literature classes. There are three concentrations: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Most years there are twelve students per concentration. Each year, several students are named Hertog Fellows (fiction and creative nonfiction) and Thomas Hunter Fellows (poetry). These students are paired with established writers, for whom they conduct research for one semester.

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Hunter College’s Creative Writing Program

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Hunter College presents the Distinguished Writers Series, one of the signal components of the Hunter Creative Writing Program. It has a rich history and continuing tradition of presenting intimate readings and class visits to their MFA seminars from the leading voices in contemporary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

Writers who have participated in the series and met with students include Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Zadie Smith, Louise Glück, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Pinsky, Cornelius Eady, Walter Mosley, Ian McEwan, Frank Bidart, Annie Proulx, Deborah Eisenberg, Colm Tóibín, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mary Gaitskill, Edmund White, Elizabeth Strout, Claudia Rankine, Susan Faludi, Terrance Hayes, Jhumpa Lahiri, Greg Pardlo, Karen Russell, Gary Shteyngart, and Hilton Als, among many others.

Hunter College

New York , NY

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/creativewriting

Degrees Offered

Fiction, Poetry, CNF

Residency type

Program length.

36 credits (2 years)

Financial Aid

Fellowships are available for qualified students.

Teaching opportunities

At the end of their second semester, students are eligible to apply to teach the undergraduate course “Introduction to Creative Writing.”

Editorial opportunities

Each Spring Semester, one MFA student interns as an editorial assistant at the literary journal The Threepenny Review, learning a variety of skills such as proofreading and evaluating manuscripts. Hunter pays a cool $5,000 to each intern.

• Emily Bass MFA (CNF) 2009
• Ryan Berg MFA 2008
• Sangamithra Iyer MFA (CNF) 2010
• Meng Jin MFA (Fiction) 2014
• Swati Khurana MFA (Fiction) 2015
• Phil Klay MFA (Fiction) 2011
• Nick Neely MFA (CNF)
• Chaitali Sen MFA (Fiction) 2005
• Gary Shteyngart MFA (Fiction) 2002
• Jamie L. Smith MFA 2020
• Maria Venegas MFA (CNF) 2009
• Amy Yee MFA (Fiction)

Send questions, comments and corrections to [email protected] .

Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , Best American Poetry , The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology .

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Creative Writing

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Finding Past Hunter MFA Theses

• Other Links

Some theses from Hunter's Creative Writing MFA graduates have been deposited at Cooperman Library and are shelved on floor B2.  

You can find creative writing MFA theses in Hunter's collections by trying one of the following:

• follow this  link to MFA theses in OneSearch  
• or search the phrase "M.F.A. Hunter College, English" (without the quotation marks) in the  OneSearch bar on the Hunter College Libraries' homepage , then use the filters on the left side of the results screen to narrow your search to "Dissertations" under the "Resource Type" menu.
• or search for the author or title of the thesis in OneSearch

If you're interested in reading past MFA students' work, you may also want to consult the following anthology (two copies in the Hunter College Archives & Special Collections, two circulating copies in the stacks).

• With a Little Help from Our Friends: A Hunter MFA Anthology by Packard, Gabriel (ed.) Call Number: Cooperman Library Special Collection, 2nd floor PS549 .N5 W57 2012; Cooperman Library Stacks PS549 .N5 W57 2012 Publication Date: 2012
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• URL: https://libguides.library.hunter.cuny.edu/CreativeWriting

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The Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA Playwriting Program at Hunter College is a highly selective, rigorous, and affordable two-year playwriting program located in the heart of New York City. We seek writers eager to develop their craft and challenge assumptions about what theatre is and will become. 

The Program

The program at Hunter is focused on helping writers hone their voice and aesthetic while taking risks and experimenting with form. Students study with award-winning writers, working theatre professionals, and esteemed guest artists in a program that offers intensive, hands-on writing workshops and fosters a collaborative, close-knit artistic community.

There are five students in each cohort, which allows our instructors to give students generous individual attention. Each semester, students take three courses that meet in the evenings, which enables students the flexibility to work during the day. Teaching Assistantships are available to students in their second year. To supplement coursework, the program provides a series of Master Class workshops each semester with playwrights, directors, and industry professionals, as well as free or affordable tickets to a wide range of New York City productions to facilitate a robust connection with the New York theatre community. 

The capstone project of the program is the Hunter MFA Playwrights Festival , a week-long workshop with professional directors and actors which culminates in a public reading attended by agents, literary managers, producers, and other industry professionals. You can read about our 2024 MFA Playwrights Festival HERE .

The Hunter MFA Playwriting program is both affordable and accessible. The cost of in-state tuition for one semester is $4,230, and the program is often able to provide partial or full tuition waivers to incoming students. Additionally, all students are offered paid Teaching Assistantships in their second year.

Instructors

Current and recent playwriting faculty include: david adjmi (stereophonic, stunning) clare barron   (dance nati on, you got older), eboni booth (primary trust, paris).

Mia Chung (Catch as Catc h Can, You For Me For You) Lisa D’Amour  (Detroit, Airline Highway)

Chisa Hutchinson  (Somebody's Daughter, Whitelisted) Lloyd Suh  (The Far Country, The Chinese Lady) Maria Striar  (Clubbed Thumb) Anne Washburn  (Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, The Internationalist)

Visiting Artists

2022-2023 visiting artists: eboni booth, morgan gould, raja feather kelly, aya ogawa, and mfoniso udofia.

Photos from the 2022 MFA Playwrights Festival

Student & Alumni News

April 19, 2024

Minna Lee (’24) is awarded the Lanford Wilson Award for early career playwrights.

April 4, 2024

T. Adamson's  (’17) play Usus will premiere in Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2024.

February 8, 2024

Ryan Drake's  (’21) play you don’t have to do anything premieres at HERE Arts Center.

January 25, 2024

Minna Lee's  ('24) play premieres at San Francisco Playhouse. My Home on the Moon 

January 18, 2024

Ian Robles (’23) is awarded a Tow Foundation Playwright Residency grant with Teatro Círculo for the world premiere production of Lío in Spring 2024.

June 27, 2023

Phillip Christian Smith (’23) is announced as a member of New Dramatists.

June 5, 2023

John J. Caswell Jr.’s (’20) play Wet Brain  premieres at Playwrights Horizons.

​ May 26, 2023

Diana Ly (’23) named as member of the Orchard Project Greenhouse Lab.

April 4, 2023

Maya Lawson’s (’21) play Por Du is receives a reading in the Bushwick Starr Reading Series.

​ October 13, 2022

T. Adamson (’17) is awarded the  Vineyard Theatre’s 2022-3 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award.

​ September 7, 2022

Jesse Jae Hoon  (’22) is named as a 2022-23 Playwrights Realm Writ ing Fellow.

​ July 13, 2022

Hayley Stahl  ('19) and  Chad Kaydo  ('22) are named as finalists  for the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission.

​ June 16, 2022

Diana Ly (’23) announced as a debut member of the Universal Writers Lab.

May 20, 2022

Jesse Jae Hoon (’22), Liqing Xu (’21), and Garrett Zuercher (’22) will be part of the 2022 Orchard Project Adaptation Lab

May 17, 2022

Mara Velez-Mendelez’s (’19) Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members premieres at Soho Rep.

March 16, 2022

Lindsey Ferrentino (‘14) will write and direct film version of Amy and the Orphans for Netflix.

March 1, 2022

John Caswell Jr.’s (’20) Man Cave produced by Page 73 premieres at the Connelly Theatre.

February 9, 2022

Charly Evon Simpson’s (’17) Sandblasted premieres at the Vineyard Theatre in a co-production with WP Theater.

January 31, 2022

Liqing Xu’s (‘21) Yellow Dream$ produced in Second Stage’s 2022 Judith Champion New Voices Series.

January 18, 2022

Liz Appel’s (’21) Bells Like Hooves produced in Roundabout Theatre Com pany’s 2022 Underground Reading Series.

September 23, 2021

Justice Hehir (’18) and Hannah Novak (’18) receive Clubbed Thumb Constitution Commissions.

September 15, 2021

Garrett Zuercher  (‘21) produces and directs Deaf Broadway’s concert production of Into the Woods  for Restart Stages at Lincoln Center.

May 22, 2021

Garrett Zuercher  (‘22) wins the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.

September 24, 2020

John J. Caswell Jr.  (‘20) received the Vineyard Theatre’s 2020 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award.

I am incredibly grateful for my time in the Hunter Playwriting MFA program.   I wanted the opportunity to focus and deepen my craft, to work with undergraduates in preparation for future teaching, and to stay in NYC and involved with theater in the city. This program allowed me to do all three of those things and more while working with professors and fellow students I greatly admired.   It pushed me in the ways I need to be pushed in order to grow as a playwright.

- Charly Evon Simpson, Class of 2017

Read the MFA Playwriting Program’s 2021-2022 Newsletter HERE

Admission  requirements.

You must meet the following minimum requirements in order to be considered for admission. Meeting these minimum requirements does not guarantee acceptance to the program.​

Interviews will be conducted with a select group of candidates after the initial review of application is completed. (Only matriculated students are eligible to take MFA courses.)

A bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited institution comparable in standard and content to a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College.

Play Manuscript - Submit a full length play at least 45 pages as a PDF. A digital copy of the manuscript needs to be uploaded in the online applications system before submitting the application

Two letters of recommendation from appropriate academic or professional references.

A statement of purpose of approximately 500-750 words answering the following questions: Why do you choose playwriting as a literary form? Discuss your background in the theatre, the playwrights and productions that have influenced you, and what you hope to bring to the stage.

Applicants whose native language is not English and who have taken all or part of their undergraduate education in a country where English is not the native language are required to submit scores on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The following minimum scores must be obtained:

Paper Based Test: 550

Computer Administered Test: 213

Internet Based Test: 60 (less speaking component)

FALL 2023 DEADLINE: January 15, 2024

Questions? Contact the Director of the Rita & Burton Goldberg MFA Playwriting Program, Christine Scarfuto, at [email protected] .

Ready to start your application? Click the button below!

Degree Requirements

This two-year program encourages playwrights to discover and develop their unique voices.  Students should expect a thorough grounding in theatre history, dramatic literature and theory, and the craft of playwriting. They will also have the opportunity to take electives and learn from well-known guest artists. At the end of the first year, students will have a reading with a professional director and actors. The second year of the program culminates in a 29-hour workshop of a new play and a public, staged presentation of the students’ work.

Required Courses

MFA Playwriting I:  Developing Your Voice THC 73100

MFA Playwriting II:  The Art of Revision THC 73200

MFA Playwriting III: New Play Workshop THC 73300

MFA Playwriting IV: Thesis Project THC 73400

MFA Production Workshop I: Adaptation THC 73500

MFA Production Workshop II: The Playwright Prepares THC 73600

History of Theatre I THC 75100

History of Theatre II THC 75200

Play Analysis THC 79000

Electives (9 credits)

Sample Program of Study

First Semester

History of Theatre I

MFA Playwriting I: Developing Your Voice

MFA Production Workshop I: Adaptation

Second Semester

History of Theatre II

MFA Playwriting II: The Art of Revision

Third Semester

MFA Playwriting III: New Play Workshop

Play Analysis

Fourth Semester

MFA Production Workshop II: The Playwright Prepares

MFA Playwriting IV: Thesis Project

Christine Scarfuto Program Director [email protected]

The Director of the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA in Playwriting is Christine Scarfuto. Christine is a dramaturg with over a decade of experience in new play development. She was the Literary Manager of Long Wharf Theatre from 2015-2019 and has worked with Second Stage Theater, LCT3, Signature Theatre, Lark Play Development Center, Playwrights Center, Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Realm, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and the Kennedy Center. Christine was educated entirely in public schools including the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA in Dramaturgy.

Gregory Mosher Senior Associate Dean for the Arts [email protected]

The Program is part of the Hunter Department of Theatre, which is chaired by Tony Award-winning producer and director Gregory Mosher, who has produced over 100 world or American premieres at the Lincoln Center and Goodman Theaters, on Broadway, and in the West End. Writer colleagues in these productions include David Mamet, John Guare, Elaine May, Emily Mann, John Leguizamo, Richard Nelson, Mbongeni Ngema (Sarafina), Arthur Miller, David Hare, the Nobel Prize-winners Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and many more.

Learning Outcomes

Graduates of our MFA Playwriting Program will be able to:

Create, revise, and develop full-length dramatic works that expresses students’ own artistic aesthetic. 

Collaborate with directors, designers, actors, and other theater artists.

Develop constructive workshop practices and demonstrate the ability to closely observe, analyze, and respond constructively to the writing of workshop participants.

Analyze a variety of dramatic structures, techniques, methods, and approaches with the aim of enriching students’ own work.

Demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of theater history and practice with the aim of enriching students’ own work.

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What You Won’t Learn in an MFA

An mfa can teach you skills, but will it prepare you for a writing career.

By 2018, I had written five books and decided to pursue an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in fiction. For me, earning an MFA gave me the time and space I needed to quit my day job and transition to writing full-time, but that was something I had been building toward for over a decade. Of course, I can’t speak to all MFA programs, but in many cases, they focus almost exclusively on writing skills and don’t give writers the concrete skills they need to make money writing and publishing. I often found myself answering questions for my classmates about what publishing was really like. It simply wasn’t being taught, sometimes because faculty themselves were struggling with how to navigate writing as a business.

An MFA program may be the right choice to help you become a better writer, or because you want the qualification to teach writing at a college; it may not give you insights into navigating the publishing landscape.

Here are some of the professional development skills you may need to gain outside of the classroom on your writing journey.

Getting published

Many MFA programs don’t talk to authors about the good, the bad, and the ugly in both traditional publishing and self-publishing. There is often an assumption that if you’re in an MFA program, you’ll be seeking a traditional publishing deal. But most programs also don’t teach writers the skills to query small presses or agents who can query large presses. Even as self-publishing has become an increasingly popular publishing choice, many MFA programs aren’t giving students a clear picture of what it involves.

Contracting

My MFA program was great, but never once during my studies did I hear anyone talk about how to read, negotiate, or understand a contract. As an indie author, you’ll have fewer contracts to interact with than authors who choose to traditionally publish their work, but contracts will still come up—contracts with designers who are working on your books, contracts with podcasts or magazines publishing excerpts of your work. In my MFA program, students who were publishing were left to talk with each other to try to understand how contracts work. Most writers aren’t legal experts, and we benefit from having either a private attorney or an attorney through an organization such as the Author’s Guild review our contracts. I would love to see MFA programs better prepare writers to navigate these business interactions, to negotiate writing rates, and to understand what rights we may be signing away with a particular contract.

Writing to market

The culture of MFA programs often shames or diminishes the idea of writing to market, and instead prioritizes creating literary art for the sake of art. This is a completely valid way to approach your writing life. However, if your goal is to publish your work and sell books, understanding the market and how to write books that appeal to readers is important. There’s nothing wrong with writing books with mass-market appeal, but, depending on the program you attend, you may not hear that in classes. Especially for writers considering the self-publishing route, learning how to understand current trends and how to write books that connect to them is invaluable.

Writing is your passion, and seeing your name in print might be your dream, but when it happens, your writing also becomes a business. Understanding how to manage a writing business is something that most new writers won’t have a lot of experience with. For example, when you get paid from book sales, speaking arrangements, or most anything to do with your books, taxes aren’t going to be withheld. Instead, you’ll need to put money aside to pay your taxes. MFA programs generally don’t cover these details or highlight the importance of hiring an accountant or tax professional to help you with setting up your writing business. You may need to form an LLC for your self-publishing business, open a business bank account, and file taxes appropriately for your writing work. As a self-published author, you also may need to keep records tracking orders and inventory.

Most authors are not able to make a living from books alone. Many writers are balancing a variety of different content creation and income streams. This may include teaching at a college or university (for which a terminal degree such as an MFA is required), freelance writing, and independent teaching, to name a few possibilities. The more writing programs can give MFA students the tools they need to understand the business side of their work, the more successful they will be.

Sassafras Lowrey writes fiction and nonfiction and was the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for emerging LGBTQ writers.

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Creative Writing Program Marks Three Decades of Growth, Diversity

By Luisa A. Igloria

2024: a milestone year which marks the 30 th  anniversary of Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Its origins can be said to go back to April 1978, when the English Department’s (now Professor Emeritus, retired) Phil Raisor organized the first “Poetry Jam,” in collaboration with Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass (then a visiting poet at ODU). Raisor describes this period as “ a heady time .” Not many realize that from 1978 to 1994, ODU was also the home of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) until it moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The two-day celebration that was “Poetry Jam” has evolved into the annual ODU Literary Festival, a week-long affair at the beginning of October bringing writers of local, national, and international reputation to campus. The ODU Literary Festival is among the longest continuously running literary festivals nationwide. It has featured Rita Dove, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, John McPhee, Tim O’Brien, Joy Harjo, Dorothy Allison, Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sabina Murray, Jane Hirshfield, Brian Turner, S.A. Cosby, Nicole Sealey, Franny Choi, Ross Gay, Adrian Matejka, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ilya Kaminsky, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Jose Olivarez, and Ocean Vuong, among a roster of other luminaries. MFA alumni who have gone on to publish books have also regularly been invited to read.

From an initial cohort of 12 students and three creative writing professors, ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program has grown to anywhere between 25 to 33 talented students per year. Currently they work with a five-member core faculty (Kent Wascom, John McManus, and Jane Alberdeston in fiction; and Luisa A. Igloria and Marianne L. Chan in poetry). Award-winning writers who made up part of original teaching faculty along with Raisor (but are now also either retired or relocated) are legends in their own right—Toi Derricotte, Tony Ardizzone, Janet Peery, Scott Cairns, Sheri Reynolds, Tim Seibles, and Michael Pearson. Other faculty that ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program was privileged to briefly have in its ranks include Molly McCully Brown and Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley.

"What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here." — Luisa A. Igloria, Louis I. Jaffe Endowed Professor & University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University

Our student body is diverse — from all over the country as well as from closer by. Over the last ten years, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of international students who are drawn to what our program has to offer: an exciting three-year curriculum of workshops, literature, literary publishing, and critical studies; as well as opportunities to teach in the classroom, tutor in the University’s Writing Center, coordinate the student reading series and the Writers in Community outreach program, and produce the student-led literary journal  Barely South Review . The third year gives our students more time to immerse themselves in the completion of a book-ready creative thesis. And our students’ successes have been nothing but amazing. They’ve published with some of the best (many while still in the program), won important prizes, moved into tenured academic positions, and been published in global languages. What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here.

Our themed studio workshops are now offered as hybrid/cross genre experiences. My colleagues teach workshops in horror, speculative and experimental fiction, poetry of place, poetry and the archive — these give our students so many more options for honing their skills. And we continue to explore ways to collaborate with other programs and units of the university. One of my cornerstone projects during my term as 20 th  Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth was the creation of a Virginia Poets Database, which is not only supported by the University through the Perry Library’s Digital Commons, but also by the MFA Program in the form of an assistantship for one of our students. With the awareness of ODU’s new integration with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and its impact on other programs, I was inspired to design and pilot a new 700-level seminar on “Writing the Body Fantastic: Exploring Metaphors of Human Corporeality.” In the fall of 2024, I look forward to a themed graduate workshop on “Writing (in) the Anthropocene,” where my students and I will explore the subject of climate precarity and how we can respond in our own work.

Even as the University and wider community go through shifts and change through time, the MFA program has grown with resilience and grace. Once, during the six years (2009-15) that I directed the MFA Program, a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) university-wide review amended the guidelines for what kind of graduate student would be allowed to teach classes (only those who had  already  earned 18 or more graduate credits). Thus, two of our first-year MFA students at that time had to be given another assignment for their Teaching Assistantships. I thought of  AWP’s hallmarks of an effective MFA program , which lists the provision of editorial and publishing experience to its students through an affiliated magazine or press — and immediately sought department and upper administration support for creating a literary journal. This is what led to the creation of our biannual  Barely South Review  in 2009.

In 2010,  HuffPost  and  Poets & Writers  listed us among “ The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs ” (better underrated than overrated, right?) — and while our MFA Creative Writing Program might be smaller than others, we do grow good writers here. When I joined the faculty in 1998, I was excited by the high caliber of both faculty and students. Twenty-five years later, I remain just as if not more excited, and look forward to all the that awaits us in our continued growth.

This essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 edition of Barely South Review , ODU’s student-led literary journal. The University’s growing MFA in Creative Writing program connects students with a seven-member creative writing faculty in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

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IELTS Exam Preparation: Free IELTS Tips, 2024

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Take IELTS test in or nearby Elektrostal'

There is no IELTS test center listed for Elektrostal' but you may be able to take your test in an alternative test center nearby. Please choose an appropriate test center that is closer to you or is most suitable for your test depending upon location or availability of test.

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An Overview of the IELTS

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is designed to measure English proficiency for educational, vocational and immigration purposes. The IELTS measures an individual's ability to communicate in English across four areas of language: listening , reading , writing and speaking . The IELTS is administered jointly by the British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia and Cambridge English Language Assessment at over 1,100 test centres and 140 countries. These test centres supervise the local administration of the test and recruit, train and monitor IELTS examiners.

IELTS tests are available on 48 fixed dates each year, usually Saturdays and sometimes Thursdays, and may be offered up to four times a month at any test centre, including Elektrostal' depending on local needs. Go to IELTS test locations to find a test centre in or nearby Elektrostal' and to check for upcoming test dates at your test centre.

Test results are available online 13 days after your test date. You can either receive your Test Report Form by post or collect it from the Test Centre. You will normally only receive one copy of the Test Report Form, though you may ask for a second copy if you are applying to the UK or Canada for immigration purposes - be sure to specify this when you register for IELTS. You may ask for up to 5 copies of your Test Report Form to be sent directly to other organisations, such as universities.

There are no restrictions on re-sitting the IELTS. However, you would need to allow sufficient time to complete the registration procedures again and find a suitable test date.

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