In Memoriam ~ Aura Estrada

Who will really teach you

Most MFA programs can give you a dazzling list of faculty —  famous writers, household names who have taught in the past, who sometimes teach, or will occasionally teach in the future. Maybe they will be there when you arrive, or maybe they won’t be. You should really ask. If you listen closely to the answers, you will discover that the following promise is rare and precious: at Hunter, there are only three teachers in each of the disciplines. These are our faculty. These are the writers who will really teach you.  What you see is what you get.

Peter Carey, for example, has been at Hunter for eleven semesters, during which time he's taught nine semesters of Craft or Workshop and ten of Writing in Conference or Thesis Supervision. (See full details of who's taught what, in the tables at the bottom of this page.)

It is true that, as of 2008, on the fiction course you can only take two classes with Peter Carey and, on the memoir course, one with the extraordinary Eva Hoffman, but either one of them might be your thesis advisor, in which case you would work with them intensely one-on-one for one or both semesters of your final year.

Each Spring Semester, starting in 2009, Claire Messud will teach a Literary Traditions course for Hunter MFA students of all genres. It will look at literature from a writer's perspective and will count as one of the two required literature classes that all Hunter MFA students must take. And novelist Jenny Shute also teaches literature courses with a writer's perspective -- which are open to first-year MFA students.

Colum McCann will definitely teach you fiction, if you are on the fiction course. Four classes in four semesters. Do check out his website and get to know his work.

Nathan Englander teaches fiction students every Spring semester. Take a look at his web site, and follow the active links for our poetry faculty:  Tom Sleigh, Donna Masini, Jan Heller Levi. We’ve provided active links so you can find out more about them. Louise DeSalvo, Kathryn Harrison and Eva Hoffman teach memoir. And Meena Alexander occasionally teaches poetry or memoir. Clicking on any of their names will take you to a page where you learn more about their work. Of course it doesn’t tell you how they teach. To get this key information you should come to an open house and talk to their students.

FICTION

POETRY

MEMOIR

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