Our Program

 

We provide an affordable, flexible graduate education, full-time or part-time, in Southampton or Manhattan for talented writers searching for a place to advance their craft.

At the Lichtenstein Center's MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University, we welcome writers who seek to create original work primarily in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. We offer generous guidance that is friendly, rigorous, and professionally useful. 

Unlike most MFA programs, ours encourages students to take workshops in all kinds of writing, rather than being tracked upon acceptance into a single genre. We invite students to explore, in the belief that writing outside their genres informs their primary areas of interest.

Beyond the familiar categories of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, we offer workshops in other forms of creative expression relevant to understanding and mastering a world constructed out of words and images. Recent course offerings have included speculative, YA novel, and experimental literature. In our Manhattan location, students will find opportunities to explore writing for Television or Film. Our literature courses are taught by working writers, with an eye to how reading informs craft. 

While we believe the major focus of your MFA should be on developing your own writing, understanding the larger world of writing is important. We offer practica in publishing, teaching, and arts administration; a course in the business of being a writer; plus query workshops, and agent visits.