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 coursework 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. 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.
It is with great sadness that we share the passing of our beloved Lucie Brock-Broido. As Professor and Director of the Poetry concentration, Lucie was a brilliant guide for generations of students, an esteemed member of the Writing faculty, and a beautiful presence in all of our lives.
Organized by Susan Bernofsky, Literary Translation at Columbia, Writing Ana Luísa Amaral has published over thirty books of poetry, a play, a novel, essays, and several books for children. She was translated into over twenty languages and published in several countries. She herself has translated the poetry of Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare or John Updike. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago and Javier Marías, as well as the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Ana Luísa Amaral and Fernando Pessoa.
Current fiction student Francisco González was named a Glimmer Train finalist for his short story, Increments of Dust. He was also a finalist for Beloit Fiction Journal's 2019 Hamlin Garland Award for his short story Panda Express.
English-language translations of The Bacchae by Euripides, by Poet and classicist Aaron Poochigian '16, produced in 2018 by SITI Company at the Getty Theater in Los Angeles and BAM in New York, and Four Plays by Aristophanes were sold in an exclusive two-book deal to Norton.
Poetry alumna Subhashini Kaligotla '06 will be holding a poetry reading and conversation with Professor Timothy Donnelly '98 Friday, April 5 at 7pm at Book Culture to celebrate her first book of poems, Bird of the Indian Subcontinent.