Open Houses
With outstanding faculty on two campuses (New York City and Southampton, NY), you'll find the right place to earn your MFA.
With full or part-time student options, you've got time to write.
With New York State tuition plus Graduate Assistant and Teaching Assistant opportunities, you don't need an MBA to pay for your MFA.
Open House Dates
10/10 - Online @ 7 PM- RSVP here.
10/16 - Stony Brook Southampton @ 6 PM- RSVP here.
10/23 - Stony Brook Manhattan Center @ 5 PM- RSVP here.
11/19 - Online @ 7 PM - RSVP here.
12/03 - Stony Brook Manhattan Center @ 4 PM- RSVP here.
Missed or Can't Make the Open House? Sign up for our mailing list.
Writers Speak Wednesday
In Person: Stony Brook Manhattan Campus - 535 Eighth Avenue, Fifth Floor (unless otherwise noted).
In Person: Stony Brook Southampton Campus - 39 Tuckahoe Rd, Southampton.
Streaming: https: www.youtube.com/mfawriting
Fall 2024 - Manhattan
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september 11 - Alice carriere - 6PM
Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. She is the author of the memoir Everything/Nothing/Someone, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Indie Next Pick, and among Real Simple and Kirkus’ best books of 2023. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Oprah Daily, and the New York Times. She lives in Amagansett, NY and Nashville, TN.
september 25 - Lance Olsen - 6PM
Lance Olsen is author of more than 30 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, Absolute Away (Dzanc, 2024), Shrapnel: Contemplations (Anti-Oedipus, 2024), and Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (FC2, 2023). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, Pushcart Prize, and two-time N.E.A. Fellowship recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar (Finland), he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah, where he taught experimental narrative theory and practice.
october 23 - shelly oria - 6PM
Shelly Oriais the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), which earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, among other honors. In 2016, she coauthored a digital novella,CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
october 30 - Essie chambers - 6PM
Essie Chambers is an author and award-winning independent producer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. Previously, she worked as a television executive, and was a producer on the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Descendant, which was released by the Obamas’ Higher Ground production company and Netflix in 2022. Swift River is her debut novel.
Fall 2024 - Southampton
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September 18 - Lauren Aliza green - 7PM
Lauren Aliza Green is a novelist, poet, and musician. Her debut novel, The World After Alice, is out now from Viking (US) and Penguin Michael Joseph (UK). Her chapbook, A Great Dark House, won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Virginia Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Other recognitions include the Eavan Boland Award, sponsored by Poetry Ireland and Stanford University, and a spot on Forbes' 2024 30 Under 30 list.
October 16 - Maya shanbhag lang - 7PM
Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a “Best Of 2020” by Amazon, Bookshop.Org, “Good Morning America,” PopSugar, Platform Magazine, Bustle, and others. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June, a modern reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a must-read novel by CBS and InStyle.
Lang’s essays have been widely published and anthologized. Winner of the Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction, she also writes short stories. In 2020, she was named a “Woman You Should Know” by the American Civil Rights Museum for representing Indian American voices.
After graduating magna cum laude from Swarthmore College, Lang obtained her M.A. from NYU and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stony Brook University. Her dissertation, “The Hypochondriac: Bodies in Protest from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison” won the Weisinger Award for outstanding doctoral achievement.
A passionate teacher and author advocate, Lang enjoys connecting with emerging and established writers alike. She is the proud parent of a non-binary teenager and lives in Westchester.
November 6 - An evening of Poetry - 7PM
Sarah Kain Gutowski (she/her) is the author of The Familiar and Fabulous Beast: Poems, which was a runner-up for the 2018 X.J. Kennedy Prize, a 2019 Foreword INDIES Finalist, and winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poems, and It's All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals, including The Threepenny Review, So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Verse Daily, and The Southern Review. She's taught workshops at NYU, Stony Brook University and is a full-time, tenured Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College.
Christine Kitano is the author of two collections of poetry, Sky Country (BOA Editions, 2017), and Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press, 2011). Sky Country won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press, 2024) won the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize. She co-edited the oral history collection Who You? Hawai'i Issei (University of Hawai'i / Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i Press, 2017) and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women's Poetry (Blue Oak Press, 2022). She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University where she teaches in the MFA and BFA programs in Creative Writing and Literature. She has served on the faculty for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 2018.
Michelle Whittaker is a Long Island poet of West Indian American heritage and the author of Surge which was awarded a Next Generation Indie Book Award (great weather for Media) and Spoke the Dark Matter (Sundress Publication, 2024). Her work can be found in the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Shenandoah, Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day series and other publications. She was awarded Cave Canem and NYFA Fellowships in Poetry. Currently, she is the Poetry Editor at The Southampton Review and an Associate Professor creative writer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.
Spring 2024 - Manhattan
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February 14 - Chloe Cooper Jones - 6PM
Chloé Cooper Jones is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. In 2020, Chloé was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing for “Fearing for His Life,” a profile of Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner. She was the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and the 2021 Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University. Both grants are in support of her book Easy Beauty, a memoir which finds the author—after unexpectedly becoming a mother—embarking on a journey across the globe to reclaim the spaces, both physical and emotional, that she’d been denied and denied herself. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
March 6th - Iain Haley PollocK - 6PM
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (2011), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, PoetrySociety.org and The Progressive. Outside of publishing poems, Pollock performs his work widely, from the Dodge Poetry Festival to libraries and art centers; he curated the Rye Poetry Path, a public poetry installation in Rye, NY; and he serves on the editorial board at Slapering Hol Press and on the board of Tiger Bark Press. Pollock currently directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College, where he edits the literary journal Inkwell.
April 3rd - Catherine Lacey - 6PM
Catherine Lacey is the author of five books: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and a short story collection, Certain American States. Her honors include the Brooklyn Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. Based in Mexico, she is a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library for 2023-24. Her debut work of nonfiction, The Möbius Book, is forthcoming from FSG, as well as a second short story collection, My Stalkers.
April 17th - John McWhorter - 6PM
John H. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American Studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is a contributing editor at the Atlantic and host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast. McWhorter is the author of twenty books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.
April 24th - MFA Student Reading - 6PM
Join us for our end of year reading highlighting current MFA students.
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Spring 2024 - Southampton
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February 21st - Vanessa Cuti - 6:40PM
Vanessa Cuti's fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, West Branch, Indiana Review, and others. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and lives in the suburbs of New York. The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) is her debut novel.
March 20th - Anthony DiPietro - 6:40PM
Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet and arts administrator originally from Providence, Rhode Island. He has lived throughout New England and in California, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, he also earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University. Now deputy director of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, he resides in Worcester, MA. He composed his 2021 chapbook And Walk Through (Seven Kitchens Press) on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns. kiss & release is his debut collection. His writing and readings are featured on his website, www.AnthonyWriter.com.
April 10th - SCOTT CHASKEY - 6:40PM
Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit. He is also the author of a memoir, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, and a book of nonfiction, Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades. A pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for thirty years he cultivated more than sixty crops for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of the original CSAs in the country. He is past president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, and was honored as Farmer of the Year in 2013. He was a founding board member for both the Center for Whole Communities, in Vermont, and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, in Shelter Island, New York. He taught as a poet-in-the-schools for over two decades, and as an instructor for Antioch International and Friends World College in Southampton. Chaskey lives and works on the east end of Long Island, New York.
May 1st - MFA Student Reading - 6:40PM
Join us for our end of year reading highlighting current MFA students.