MFA Creative Writing
Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Poetry
A completely new Creative Nonfiction MFA
We seem to be dominated by a culture where facts are treated as negotiable, even assailed as a hindrance. At Hunter you will discover that we see it differently. To us facts are liberating. They are the foundation of our art.
But before you can get to the art, you have to report the stories. This demands courage, curiosity, persistence, not to mention a high tolerance for confusion and dead-ends. We want to help our students find their unique authorial voices through the rigorous and joyful work of gathering evidence.
Creative Nonfiction begins in process-how we move in the world and relate to people or to subjects or environments. Unlike conventional journalism, Creative Nonfiction springs from personal perspective-whether it be essays, opinion, reportage, memoir or hybrid forms of storytelling.
We seek students who look both inward and outward, who are committed to the connections between their experiences and the broader concerns of the world.
Meet the faculty who will teach you how to do what is demanded in the real world of Creative Nonfiction writing.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author, most recently, of the story collection, American Estrangement, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was selected as one of the 10 best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and his story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers' fiction fellowship. Sayrafiezadeh serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is also a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Eyal Press is a writer and journalist who contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times and other publications. Since the spring of 2021, he is also a sociologist with a PhD from New York University. He grew up in Buffalo, which served as the backdrop of his first book, Absolute Convictions (2006). His second book, Beautiful Souls (2012), examined the nature of moral courage through the stories of individuals who risked their careers, and sometimes their lives, to defy unjust orders. A New York Times editors' choice, the book has been translated into numerous languages and selected as the common read at several universities, including Penn State and his alma mater, Brown University. His most recent book, Dirty Work (2021), examines the morally troubling jobs that society tacitly condones and the hidden class of workers who do them. A recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, he has received an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, a Cullman Center fellowship at the New York Public Library and a Puffin Foundation fellowship at Type Media Center.
Past Creative Nonfiction Faculty