The New Writers Project is a small and highly selective MFA studio program at The University of Texas at Austin.

The New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin is a small, fully funded, three-year studio MFA program within the large and highly-ranked Department of English. We offer our students close mentorship, literary community, and teaching and editing experience. Working in concert with our partner MFA program, the Michener Center for Writers, we provide our students an artistically adventurous and intellectually rigorous terminal degree, with courses taught by both experienced and accomplished resident faculty and esteemed visitors.

The New Writers Project core faculty in fiction are Edward Carey, Oscar Cásares, Bret Anthony Johnston, Peter LaSalle, Elizabeth McCracken, and Deb Olin Unferth. Our core faculty in poetry are Lisa Olstein, Roger Reeves, and Jennifer Chang. 

The New Writers Project hosts and co-hosts an array of literary events, from open-to-the-public poetry and fiction readings to small Q&A's with authors and students. Recent guests include Jericho Brown, Maggie Nelson, George Saunders, Kazim Ali, Ann Patchett, Ada Limón, Paul Lisicky, Srikanth Reddy, Jeff Vandermeer, Evie Shockley, Kelly Link, Eula Biss, Matthew Zapruder, Kiese Laymon, Lucy Corin, Nikky Finney, Andrea Lawlor, Jennifer Chang, Brenda Shaughnessy, Rachel Zucker, Max Porter, Leni Zumas, and Lydia Davis.

With the Michener Center for Writers, we host a yearly symposium of editors and agents for our creative writing students.

Other past events can be found on our Facebook page.

A wide range of other literary events are sponsored by other UT departments, centers, and organizations, and Austin itself has a varied and excellent literary arts scene, which includes a number of independent book stores—BookPeople, Malvern Books, and BookWoman among them—and the enormous, lively, and free-to-the-public Texas Book Festival, one of the longest-running book festivals in the country.