Nonfiction

At Yale, the study of nonfiction writing proceeds from the idea that engaged reading, coupled with close observation of the real world, leads to vivid writing. Our nonfiction faculty interacts closely with the Yale Journalism Initiative and its core faculty: Steven Brill, Mark Oppenheimer, and Bob Woodward. The seminars we offer range across the entire nonfiction spectrum, from lyric essay to memoir to long-form reporting to science writing. We provide students a foundation that allows them to write well about subjects to which they are drawn, including, for example, a 90-year-old typewriter repairman, the ethics of sweatshops, the side effects of hormonal birth control, or the trial and incarceration of a parent. Work produced in our classrooms has even had remarkable success in national writing competitions. For example, more Yale submissions have been honored in the Norman Mailer Writing Competition than those from any other university. After graduation, our students enter a variety of fields — medicine, law, finance — in which they depend daily on the skills they have honed in class and on the page. Many have become professional writers and have gone on to contribute to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Economist, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications, and to write books that have reached wide audiences.