About the Program
Our Mission
At the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University's Lichtenstein Center, we welcome writers who seek to create original work primarily in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. We offer guidance that is friendly, rigorous, professionally useful and hands on. Enrollment in our writing workshops is capped at twelve.
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 writing on location, YA novel, and experimental literature.
Our literature courses are taught by working writers, with an eye to how reading informs craft. (More traditional graduate literature courses are also available.) And devoted genre-busters will find opportunities to collaborate with practitioners in other fields, especially film and television.
Our Students
We foster a community 
within the Lichtenestein Center that is united in its commitment to writing as art
but inclusive of those who do not fit neatly into the constraints of the academy.
Literary success comes in many forms, from active publication to more idiosyncratic
allegiances to the creative process.
Our students display a range of interests and experience; they include recent college graduates, post-career professionals, working journalists, secondary school teachers, editors, and professors seeking to make a transition from scholarly to creative writing. Some arrive with full-time lives to seek part-time studies. Others come as full-time students who find the affordable off-season housing in the Hamptons to be an extremely agreeable way to pursue the writing life.
Still other students combine coursework at Stony Brook Manhattan with workshops at the Southampton campus during the summer. Even commitment-phobic writers have a place here, taking short-term courses of study. (Sorry, you have to be just as talented a writer as the MFA students to get a spot in workshops.)
To serve this thriving and diverse community, we offer courses year-round. Traditional semester-long courses meet during weekdays and on evenings at both Southampton and Manhattan. We also offer weekend intensives during fall and spring terms. In addition, nearly all of our students register for a course or two during the Southampton Writers Conference, our intensive summer sessions.
Our Faculty
All of our courses, whether in creative writing or literature, are taught by practicing writers who are themselves producing original work. Our full-time core faculty is joined by a regular cast of visiting writers who provide creative breadth to the program or bring expertise in more specialized areas of creative writing.
These distinguished authors rotate into the schedule throughout the year, teaching in the regular term at Southampton or Manhattan, or in the summer at Southampton.
We also welcome a parade of visiting writers to both Manhattan and Southampton through our reading series, Writers Speak. In the spring, we bring to campus a series of literary agents, who hold individual conferences with students in thesis.
All our faculty members, full time and visiting, have joined us because they care
about encouraging new voices. Still others visit us in the pages of our distinguished
literary journal, The Southampton Review.
Our Community
The MFA in Creative Writing and Literature is part of Stony Brook University, one of America’s distinguished institutions of higher learning (58th nationally) and the flagship university of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Our program enjoys all the opportunities and privileges of such a resource: access to the vast holdings of the Melville Library, graduate courses in other disciplines, including the English Department, a Provost’s Lecture Series in which our students present their works in progress, and centralized administrative support at the Graduate School, the Office of Financial Aid and the Registrar.
But encamped as we are on separate arts campuses, the MFA Program is able to offer a customized experience for the directed creative artist. In other words, come here to get your work done.