Cornell MFA

ABOUT

Cornell's MFA is housed in the Department of Literatures in English and sits alongside the department's undergraduate creative writing concentration and minor, its Zalaznick Reading Series, and EPOCH, the literary magazine the department has published continuously since 1947. The program has long traded on smallness and close faculty contact rather than sheer output: current creative writing faculty include poets Ishion Hutchinson, Valzhyna Mort (who directs the program), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Sandeep Parmar, and James Byrne, alongside fiction writers NoViolet Bulawayo, J. Robert Lennon (who also edits EPOCH), Alexandra Kleeman, Alex Gilvarry, Ernesto Quiñonez, Emily Fridlund, and Helena María Viramontes. MFA students run their own First-Year Reading Series and give a joint reading in their final spring, and many graduates go on to staff or edit EPOCH itself while enrolled — a hands-on editorial apprenticeship that's part of the program's identity as much as the workshop.

Admission and funding details live on the department's separate MFA Admissions and Financial Support page rather than here; this page functions mainly as the program's front door, linking out to the MFA timeline, procedural guide, and EPOCH's own site (epochliterary.com) for that magazine's submission guidelines. The program is a two-year, workshop-based degree in fiction or poetry with teaching responsibilities built in (MFA students teach undergraduate creative writing courses and/or work on EPOCH), which is the standard route to funding at Cornell. No fees, stipend figures, or acceptance rates are stated on this page — applicants should go directly to the admissions and financial support link for cycle-specific deadlines and requirements rather than assume terms from this overview.