About the Program

Get Your Work Done

At the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton, we welcome aspiring writers who seek to create original work primarily in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. We offer guidance that is friendly, rigorous, professionally useful and hands on. Enrollment in our writing workshops is capped at twelve. Unlike most MFA programs, ours encourages students to take workshops in all kinds of writing, rather than being tracked upon acceptance into a single genre. We invite students to explore, in the belief that writing outside their genres informs their primary areas of interest.

Beyond the familiar categories of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, we offer workshops in other forms of creative expression relevant to understanding and mastering a world constructed out of words and images. Recent course offerings have included graphic novel, children’s literature, and poetry with a bookmaking emphasis. Our literature courses are taught by working writers, with an eye to how reading informs craft. (More traditional graduate literature courses are also available.) And devoted genre-busters will find ample opportunities to collaborate with practitioners in theater, film and the visual arts. Those disciplines attract an equally broad range of distinguished professors, whether during the summer sessions or throughout the year.

Our Students

We foster a community united in its commitment to writing as art but inclusive of those who do not fit neatly into the constraints of the academy. Literary success comes in many forms, from active publication to more idiosyncratic allegiances to the creative process. Our students display a range of interests and experience; they include recent college graduates, post-career professionals, working journalists, secondary school teachers, editors, and professors seeking to make a transition from scholarly to creative writing. Some arrive with full-time lives to seek part-time studies.  Others come as full-time students who find the affordable off-season housing in the Hamptons to be an extremely agreeable way to pursue the writing life. Still other students combine coursework at Stony Brook Manhattan with workshops at the Southampton campus during the summer. Even commitment-phobic writers have a place here, taking short-term courses of study. (Sorry, you have to be just as talented a writer as the MFA students to get a spot in workshops.)

To serve this thriving and diverse community, we offer courses year-round. Traditional semester-long courses meet during weekdays and on evenings at both Southampton and Manhattan. We also offer weekend intensives during fall and spring terms. In addition, nearly all of our students register for a course or two during the intensive summer sessions at Southampton. Manhattan track students, poor dears, are actually required to take at least one working vacation in the Hamptons. Finally, during the winter break, we offer opportunities to take workshops abroad, in Florence, Italy and the Turkana Basin, Kenya. 

Drama Queen? We have an impressive theater and film program (TAF) on campus that offers scriptwriting workshops with some of the top names on Broadway and in Hollywood. These are open to creative writing students, who work alongside playwrights and screenwriters. Some of our students have written scripts for their thesis projects in collaboration with TAF faculty.

All of our courses, whether in creative writing or literature, are taught by practicing writers who are themselves producing original work. Our full-time core faculty is joined by a regular cast of over thirty visiting writers who provide creative breadth to the program or bring expertise in more specialized areas of creative writing. These distinguished visitors rotate into the schedule throughout the year, teaching in the regular term at Southampton or Manhattan, in the summer at Southampton, or in the winter sessions in Florence or Kenya. All our faculty members, full time and visiting, have joined us because they care about encouraging new voices.

Stony Brook Southampton is part of Stony Brook University, widely regarded as one of America’s distinguished institutions of higher learning. Our program enjoys all the opportunities and privileges of such a resource: access to the vast holdings of the Melville Library, graduate courses in other disciplines, especially the English Department, a Provosts Lecture Series in which our students present their works in progress, and centralized administrative support at the Graduate School, the Office of Financial Aid and the Registrar. But encamped as we are on a separate arts campus, Southampton’s MFA Program is able to offer a customized experience for the directed creative artist. In other words, come here to get your work done.

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Perspectives

Helen Simonson, MFA Alumnae
What is truly amazing about this program is that not only have I had the chance to learn craft from some of today’s greatest writers in their fields, but also that these famous talents treat the students as fellow writers. To have my work taken completely seriously was at first a shock and then a complete joy. This leadership also encourages the student body to treat each other exceptionally well and it has been very valuable to attend workshops where tough criticism is delivered in an atmosphere of trust and mutual growth. I have made valuable friendships here and discovered that there can be room for many kinds of voices in the writing world.

Essays with Roger Rosenblatt, humor writing with Jules Feiffer, poetry with Billy Collins—this is what a writing program should be. The chance to work with, and soak up craft from, the very best writers in their fields makes this program and summer conference a truly special experience.

They say you can’t teach writing and yet I can feel my skills expanding weekly in this program. I’ve learned to prize the story over the individual beautiful sentence. I’ve learned that every verb, every comma, and every white space between words matters in a poem. I’ve learned to give myself permission to wander wherever an essay takes me and then to shave every last unnecessary thought to achieve brutally crisp prose. Maybe you can’t teach writing, but the faculty at Southampton teaches inspiration every day.

There’s something in the water of the East End of Long Island that nourishes art of all kinds. The concentration of master writers out here is truly spectacular and Southampton has become a kind of central meeting point. Not only do you have professors like Roger Rosenblatt and Jules Feiffer but then E.L. Doctorow drops by at the summer conference or Alan Alda comes to chat with students in the evening.

JB McGeever, MFA Candidate
Much like the concept of six degrees of separation, almost everything I’ve ever achieved in writing has come as a result of my involvement in Southampton’s writing program and its wonderful Writers Conference. Every story or article published, every opportunity to read work, if I peel back the layers, like checking the notches on a tree, the foundation is always Southampton…

Carole O’Malley Gaunt, Writers Conference Participant, 2007
When I ignore my need to write, I begin to feel an almost physical anxiety, a blurred sense that there is something I would like to be doing and I just can’t focus on what it is. About then I might stumble on a trapezoidal-shaped bookmark, a scribbled scrap of copy paper I keep. There I have jotted down in green ink the wise advice from a faculty panel of the Southampton Writers Conference—the “write the hot spots” dictum of Frank McCourt; Roger Rosenblatt’s take that students view writing as a “privilege and celebratory”; Billy Collins’ advice to “lighten up and play”; and Melissa Banks’ urging that we develop a respect for how we spend our time and less for how the world regards us. The Conference’s gift to me—that bookmark—is that I sit myself down to write.

My memoir, Hungry Hill, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in June 2007, shaped in part by what I learned at the Southampton Writers Conference— from Frank McCourt’s wise advice to Stephen O’Connor’s urging me to abandon my autobiographical third-person stories and write a memoir in the first person. Finally, I owe a great debt to Robert Reeves, masterful impresario, who produces a well-planned, carefully thought out conference year after year with aplomb and quiet humor.

George J. Searles, Ph.D., Former Carnegie Foundation New York State “Professor of the Year” and Writers Conference Participant, 2004 to 2007
Having attended many writing conferences over the years, I rate Southampton the very best, hands-down. It’s large enough that everyone can easily locate kindred spirits, and personal enough that nobody is excluded. The all-star faculty, the glamour and natural beauty of the Hamptons, and the lively social component make this conference a real winner! I’ve participated three times, learning a great deal while having a lot of fun. I’ll certainly be back!

Sande Boritz Berger, MFA Candidate
Years ago as a young working mother, I’d been struck by an enticing advertisement appearing in the The New York Times for a writing workshop to be held on Long Island.

I’d always written but parenthood and a career in video marketing allowed little time for personal writing. So I made the necessary arrangements and drove out east (I’d never been past Exit 44 of the LIE) and checked into the Shinnecock Motel. I enrolled in a fiction workshop taught by writer Judith Rossner of Looking For Mr. Goodbar fame. That week changed my life forever. I promised myself that no matter what, I’d find the time to keep writing.

Though for years afterward I studied in workshops held in the city—The Writers Voice being one—I was thrilled when Southampton’s Writing Program, under the direction of Robert Reeves, rapidly evolved into one of the finest writing programs in the country. As an attendee from the program’s inception, I was struck by the congeniality and fine quality of the writing faculty, the varied background and talent of those enrolled, and the exceptional beauty of the environs: the natural habitat and inspiring atmosphere in which the program was cradled. Perhaps it was the power of these surroundings that created a less intimidating workplace for both faculty and students—a wonderful place in which to learn, to teach, especially to write creatively.

Over the years I’ve continued to participate in the Southampton Writers Conference studying under such generous and brilliant writers as Frank McCourt, Roger Rosenblatt, Matt Klam, and Melissa Bank. As a six-year attendee, I was encouraged to enroll as a candidate in the school’s MFA program in Writing and Literature, and I am writing my thesis— a novel that I’d begun long ago when I was a harried working mom with barely time to breathe. The graduate writing program and annual conferences have stood as a cultural and educational center for so many, providing a vehicle for people like myself…that rare and unique opportunity to expand personally, regardless of age, origin, or experience.