Writing
The Pratt MFA in Writing is a 39-credit, two-year program that offers contemporary writers the tools and the support they need to build a practice that is responsive to our rapidly evolving environmental and political times.
Our approach to the MFA curriculum favors collective critique sessions similar to the art-school studio model (where core faculty, guest artists, and peers working in multiple genres, all engage in weekly discussions and presentations of student work). Additionally, students take part in one-to-one guided mentorships, develop fieldwork projects that seek to open their writing practices to the world, and participate in seminars that offer numerous fields of intellectual and creative inquiry: Literature, Media Studies, Performance, Experimental Practices, Activism, and Critical Theory, to name a few.
In this program, students work in a variety of mediums, lineages and forms, including fiction and poetry, performance, nonfiction, translation, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, documentary, digital media, image/text and visual practices. We encourage collaboration and the exploration of hybrid approaches to writing as a set of interactive processes that can potentially generate new and transformative social spaces.
Aciting Chair
Claire Donato
cdonato@pratt.edu
Assistant Chair
Alysia Laferriere
aslocum@pratt.edu
Assistant to the Chair
Katherine Barbadoro
kbarbado@pratt.edu
Office
Tel: 718.687.5770
www.pratt.edu/grad-writing
WR-577 Visiting Writer/Visiting Collective - (2 Credits)
The class will be a semester-long praxis lead by the visiting writer or visiting collaborative group currently in residence. The visiting writer/visiting collaborative group will work with students to plan, research, develop, and execute an on-campus or off-campus collaborative project, intervention, performance, or excursion. This section is for graduate students only.
WR-593 Ecopoetics - (3 Credits)
Human language use is an inherently ecological practice in that it participates in forming the way we think, write, and act in regards to the world we share with other living things. As such, language can be used as a force for imagining and establishing new ways of living together, but it must also be scrutinized for the ways in which our past and presents linguistic concepts and strategies have contributed to a history of unsustainable attitudes and practices. In this course, we will read across a broad spectrum of poetry, philosophy, and history-as well as looking at a number of works in other media (film, video, image, and earthworks)-in order to contextualize contemporary ecolinguistic practices. We will also write: in the spirit of experiment and serious play, our poems and essays will test some of the ideas, concepts and orientations we discover along the way.
WR-600A Mentored Studies I - (1 Credit)
Mentored Studies (I and II) is one of the core sequences in the graduate Writing Program. This course, Mentored Studies I, allows students to work closely over the semester with their writing Mentor. Through 4-5 targeted meetings, the Mentored Studies class is designed to provide a student with one-on-one contact, advisement, and in-depth creative engagement with their mentors.
WR-600B Mentored Studies II - (1 Credit)
Mentored Studies (I and II) is one of the core sequences in the graduate Writing Program. This course, Mentored Studies II, allows students to work one-on-one over the semester with their writing mentor in order to seek advice, share knowledge, and receive feedback and guidance on their writing.
WR-600C Mentored Studies III - (1 Credit)
Mentored Studies I, II, III, & IV constitute one of the core sequences in the graduate Writing Program. Upon entering the program all incoming students will be paired with a Writing faculty mentor and begin the sequence in their first semester with Mentored Studies I, continuing with Mentored Studies II in the second semester, and so forth for each of the four semesters. Through targeted meetings over the third semester, Mentored Studies III continues the practice of one-on-one advisement and creative engagement begun in Mentored Studies I and II. This course also incorporates the conceptualization and making of the thesis, as the mentor's role expands to include thesis chair.
WR-600D Mentored Studies IV - (1 Credit)
Mentored Studies I, II, III, & IV constitute one of the core sequences in the graduate Writing Program. Upon entering the program all incoming students will be paired with a Writing faculty mentor and begin the sequence in their first semester with Mentored Studies I, continuing with Mentored Studies II in the second semester, and so forth for each of the four semesters. Through targeted meetings over the fourth semester, Mentored Studies IV continues the practice of one-on-one advisement and creative engagement begun in Mentored Studies I, II, & III. The mentoring process expands here to include the direction and guiding to completion of the thesis.
WR-601 The Writing Studio - (4 Credits)
The Writing Studio is the core class of the M.F.A. in Writing. It is offered every semester and aims to provide students with an opportunity to have their creative work-in-process critiques in an engaged, dialogic, and collaborative setting by experts in the field. All first and second year M.F.A. students are required to participate. In addition, full-time and participating part-time faculty members will be invited to attend along with affiliated writers, critics, artists, activists, and designers, who will be invited as guest critics.
WR-602A Writing Practices I - (3 Credits)
This is a first year, first-semester foundational reading and discussion-based seminar covering the history and theory of collaborative and engaged writing practices. Students will explore various critical and creative lines of inquiry related to collaborative and expansive writing practices.
WR-602B Writing Practices II - (3 Credits)
This is a second year, first-semester foundational reading and discussion-based seminar that links to and extends Writing Practices I. Under the guidance of a faculty member second year students will collaboratively work with each other and with the professor to suggest texts, speakers, and pedagogical approaches that explore and thematize the history and theory of collaborative and expansive writing practices. The course aims to give students a strong sense of how the theory and tradition behind such approaches can be shared, enacted, and transmitted.
WR-603 Fieldwork Residency I - (3 Credits)
This required MFA course explores the intersections of writing and activism beyond the page and in the community. It is the prerequisite for Fieldwork II, in which students put the theoretical, methodological, and historical knowledge gained in Fieldwork I into practice by enacting a social practice project of their own.
WR-603A Fieldwork Residency I - (1 Credit)
This is a second-year hands-on practice and development residency stretching over two semesters that will oversee students' independent and self-directed and/or group-directed creative and social engagement with an outside organization that complements or inspires their writing and research practices. Guided by a faculty member, students identify an outside community group, activist group, institution, or community willing to host the student as a Writer in Residence. The student, in turn, will collaborate with this organization to develop a range of creative cross-media interventions and collaborations, which will be carried out in the following semester (Fieldwork Residency II).
WR-603B Fieldwork Residency II - (1 Credit)
This is the second of two Fieldwork sequences. It is designed, like the first, as a hands-on practice and development class that will oversee students' creative and social engagement with an outside organization that complements and feeds their writing and research practices. In this class, students collaborate with their outside community group, activist group, institution, or community in order to create and carry out creative collaborations. Students may also found a collaborative group and work together on this Fieldwork project.
WR-604B Thesis in Progress - (0 Credits)
This course is for students who have taken WR 604A: Final Thesis/Project and are in the process of producing a Final thesis/project.
WR-605 The Writing Studio - (3 Credits)
Writing Studio is the collaboratively-taught core class of the MFA in Writing. It aims to provide students with an opportunity to have their creative works-in-process discussed in an engaged, dialogic, supportive, and collaborative setting.
WR-607 Prose Interventions - (3 Credits)
In this course, students investigate the theory and practice of radical and experimental prose. The focus of study is primarily on texts by authors that maneuver syntax and language in order to question received habits of reading and writing. This tutorial is both a seminar and a practicum: Students will write a critical paper on one of the prose works we study in the course. Students will also craft a collection of their own prose interventions.
WR-608 Small Press Publishing in Theory & Practice: the Art of Shaping the Landscape - (2 Credits)
This course will familiarize students with the history of small publishing projects, zines, magazines, and journals, as a foundation for evaluating and participating in our current publishing landscape. Students will edit and publish a collection of new writing, published by the Pratt MFA in Writing Program, in addition to developing their own editorial projects.
WR-609A Thesis I - (1 Credit)
This is a foundational reading, writing and discussion-based seminar that l ays groundwork for the Thesis year of the MFA, when each student is expected to write and present a book-length creative manuscript in the genre of their interest, accompanied by a Critical Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. Under the guidance of a faculty member, students will work collaboratively with each other and with the professor to support the development of these three documents.
WR-609B Thesis II - (3 Credits)
This course is designed to guide MFA Candidates practically, conceptually, and creatively during the completion and submission of a final project or thesis. The class will be run as an informal workshop and knowledge-sharing seminar,facilitated by a faculty member, although the main emphasis will be on outside-the-classroom production.
WR-610S Special Topics in Writing - (3 Credits)
This course explores special topics in writing and in relevant theory and criticism. Topics will vary from semester to semester and will be developed by faculty who wish to explore timely, very contemporary, or new avenues of inquiry in writing pedagogy and practice. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
WR-611 Multilingualisms: Translation and/as Composition - (3 Credits)
The practice and theory of literary translation are subject to and addressed by diverse methods and ideologies, many of which have come to influence the work of contemporary writers both mono- and multi-lingual. In this theory/practice course, we will shift the focus from unidirectional translation-\"source\" language to \"target\" language-to the rich territories of multilingual texts.