The New School has been a vital center for creative writing since 1927, when we offered the first academic creative writing workshop. Since then, we have continued to develop creative writing—in the classroom and in the world. To this day, our faculty and alumni include many of contemporary literature’s most acclaimed poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers.
Program History
The poets, essayists, memoirists, and novelists who have taught and studied at The New School make up a who's who of modern American literature. A brief, incomplete, and somewhat random list includes Berenice Abbott, Joan Acocella, Hannah Arendt, John Ashberry, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Teju Cole, Billy Collins, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kay Boyle, André Breton, Jericho Brown, Anatole Broyard, Stephanie Burt, Anne Carson, Peter Caret, Lucille Clifton, Sigrid de Lima, Lydia Davis, Jacques Derrida, Ani DiFranco, Carol Muske Dukes, Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Betty Friedan, Robert Frost, Louise Glück, William Goyen, Jorie Graham, Horace Gregory, Daniel Halpern, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Hoagland, bell hooks, David Ignatow, Leslie Jamison, Alfred Kazin, Jack Kerouac, Jamaica Kincaid, Carolyn Kizer, Lisa Ko, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Madeleine L’Engle, Dorothea Lasky, Pearl London, Robert Lowell, Thomas Mann, Jacques Maritain, David Markson, Bernadette Mayer, Joyce Carol Oates, Jenny Offill, Frank O'Hara, Mario Puzo, May Sarton, Robyn Schiff, Tracy K. Smith, Layli Long Soldier, Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Strand, Sekou Sundiata, John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Tate, Hannah Tinti, Charles Tomlinson, Jean Valentine, John Waters, Eudora Welty, Ruth Westheimer, Tennessee Williams, Colson Whitehead, Kevin Young, and Marguerite Young.
Since the inception of the MFA Creative Writing Program in 1996, our faculty have comprised a range of extraordinary contemporary authors, including Hilton Als, Catherine Barnett, Shanna Compton, Karen Ellis, Angela Flournoy, John Freeman, Mary Gaitskill, Carol Goodman, Lucy Grealy, David Howe, David Hajdu, Amy Hempel, A. M. Homes, Richard Howard, Fanny Howe, Hettie Jones, James Lasdun, David Levithan, Phillip Lopate, Sarah Manguso, Greil Marcus, Douglas Martin, Patrick McGrath, Maggie Nelson, Sigrid Nunez, Sidney Offit, Danielle Pafunda, Francine Prose, Camille Rankine, Lucy Sante, Jill Santopolo, Sapphire, Tor Seidler, Dani Shapiro, Prageeta Sharma, Benjamin Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Renée Watson, Sarah Weeks, Susan Wheeler, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jenny Zhang.