To study creative writing at Columbia, in New York City, is to join a distinguished group of writers who arrived at a prestigious university in the nation's literary capital to explore the deep artistic power of language. J.D. Salinger enrolled in a short story course here in 1939. Federico Garcia Lorca wrote Poet in New York while he was a student at Columbia. Carson McCullers worked odd jobs in the city to pay for her Columbia writing courses. Eudora Welty, Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Auster: these reknowned writers and many others have left a legacy of originality and brilliance that charges the atmosphere at Columbia and lends genuine excitement to the prospect of literary creation on campus.

New York City is as vibrant as ever, home to writers from all over the world, and Columbia's literary legacy continues unabated. Home now to a top-ranked graduate MFA program in creative writing, an undergraduate program that allows students to pursue their craft under the diligent supervision of a world-class faculty, the Columbia literary experience includes rigorous writing workshops at all levels in fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, dramatic writing, and screenwriting, and seminars designed exclusively for creative writing students.

Student writers not only have access to these provocative and rigorous courses, but they also can partake in the larger offerings of Columbia's thriving arts community: the readings, lectures, performances, and plays that bring together the world's most gifted artists and writers, who come to Columbia to test their vision and explore the enormous power of literary art.

Welcome to the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University.

Ben Marcus
Chair, Creative Writing

Sam Lipsyte
Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing