Poetry
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Establishes Fellowships in Creative Writing
“The Rona Jaffe Foundation is very pleased to provide support to Brooklyn College in the form of these fellowships to incoming female graduate students in the M.F.A. program,” said Beth McCabe, director of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards and a board trustee. “They will, we hope, not only provide much-needed funding within the program, but also help attract the strongest writing candidates to apply.”
Julie Agoos, Program Coordinator
Since its inception, the Brooklyn College Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry has balanced a firm grounding in the history and tradition of the craft with cutting-edge experimental writing. Moderately priced and highly selective, this two-year program offers intensive workshops (limited to 10 students), private tutorials, and courses in the history and craft of the genre.
Attracting a diverse student body from all across the country, it has graduated such writers as John Yau, Sapphire, Paul Beatty, David Trinidad, Star Black, Karen Kelley, Tom Devaney, and Anselm Berrigan. Brooklyn's "experimental tradition" is best exemplified by the late-modernist masters John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom taught in the program. Other teachers have included Mark Strand, William Matthews, Ann Lauterbach, Douglas Crase, David Shapiro, C. K. Williams, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Joan Larkin, and, more recently, Ron Padgett Joshua Clover, Marjorie Welish and LaTasha N. Diggs.
At present, the permanent staff includes Julie Agoos, author of Echo Systems (2015), Property (2008), Calendar Year (1996), and Above the Land (1987), for which she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; Ben Lerner, author of The Lichtenberg Figures (winner of the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, a Lannan Literary Selection, and one of 2004's best books of poetry, according to Library Journal), Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006, and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award), and Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon, 2010); and Mónica de la Torre, author of Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat, 2020), The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) Public Domain (Roof Books, 2009) and Talk Shows (Switchback Books, 2006).
Talk to a Student
If you have questions you would like to ask students in the program, feel free to contact any of the following, all of whom are currently or recently enrolled:
