Our MFA Program, located on the most richly diverse undergraduate campus in the nation, a mere PATH train ride from Manhattan, is both cutting edge and deeply important. Literature comprises the consciousness and conscience of a culture, and our MFA for the 21st Century is designed to nurture many voices. Click here to read about MFA Faculty/Student Honors and Publications.

Our Writing Faculty in Fiction includes novelist, short story writer and MFA Director, Jayne Anne Phillips, novelist Tayari Jones, and novelist and essayist Alice Elliott Dark (In The Gloaming). Our Poetry faculty are distinguished poet and translator Rachel Hadas and Rigoberto Gonzalez. We also welcome two new MFA Faculty members, who will be joining us in Fall 2011: novelist/short story writer, Akhil Sharma and Brenda Shaughnessy, poet and poetry editor of Tin House. Our accomplished Nonfiction faculty, Pulitzer Prize finalist James Goodman, Vietnam and science fiction specialist H. Bruce Franklin, and jazz pianist/author Lewis Porter, offer courses or workshops to our Fiction and Poetry students.  The visiting authors who comprise our Writers at Newark Reading Series do MFA-only Q&A's; the Series is reflected in our MFA only Writers at Newark: Contemporary American Lit courses and in our community outreach to Newark.

We invite you, writers from diverse backgrounds and cultures, students whose excellence as writers will enrich Rutgers-Newark and the Newark community, to join us in this unique program. Please peruse our ideas. We accept applications beginning on November 1, 2011 and have a deadline of January 10, 2012. Prompt applications give us more time to review your work, so please try to have your work in as early as possible. We encourage you to apply with a strong, competitive manuscript and the dedication required by your craft and your calling.