Nonfiction

book icon
Graduate Courses & Requirements
folderpen icon
Application Requirements

Led by director Chloé Cooper Jones, the Nonfiction concentration in the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts includes full-time faculty Jaquira Díaz, Lis Harris, Leslie Jamison, Margo Jefferson, and Wendy S. Walters. The adjunct nonfiction faculty members have included Michael Greenberg, Eliza Griswold, Alana Newhouse, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Benjamin Taylor, and Brenda Wineapple. Recent visiting writers include Meghan Daum, Geoff Dyer, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Hampl, Laura Kipnis, Wayne Koestenbaum, Patricia Marx, Lia Purpura, Stacy Schiff, and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

The concentration offers instruction in a full range of subgenres, from memoir and personal essay to science writing, criticism, humor, research methods, profiles, food writing and lyric essay. All students engage with a range of nonfiction prose, from the Ancients to the most cutting-edge contemporaries. They leave the program able to practice more than one type of nonfiction.

Our nonfiction program offers our students an exciting and supportive community, led by a faculty composed of literary luminaries and passionately committed teachers drawn from the tremendous network of writers and editors based in New York City. Our courses cover a diverse array of genres—including personal essays and memoir, literary reportage, literary and cultural criticism—and our program encourages hybridity, rigor, and experiment.

Leslie Jamison, Associate Professor

Featured News

Book cover for 'These Bones Can Speak.'
Adin Dobkin '20 Explores Land and State Violence in 'These Bones Can Speak'

Nonfiction by Columbia Writers