Christa Schneider moved from Portland, Oregon in 2004 and chose City College for both its reputation and reasonable tuition scales. She enrolled in the MFA in Creative Writing following a long interest in literature and writing since childhood and is very pleased with the decision and her experience.

Christa remembers as a young child being drawn to literature and reading intensely. She recalls at age 16 finishing Jane Eyre and being convinced that studying literature and writing would be an integral part of her future but she couldn’t discern the mechanism that would make this happen or when.

She admires the depth and quality of the professional guidance from her teachers in the MFA Program and how some teachers develop students' voices and language, while others develop understanding of structure and narrative.

Although Christa wrote a novel for her thesis, which imposes great writing discipline, the MFA program helped her develop a critical writing voice, an essential component for her current pursuit of a PhD program at the Graduate Center.

Many MFA programs lack a rigorous grounding in literature and City College has maintained this dual track approach since the inception of the Creative Writing Program in the 1970s. "Fiction writing and literary criticism exist in the same space for me, so the MFA was a logical progression towards doctoral study."

"The combination of literary study and writing workshops is invaluable for anyone pursuing a career in academia. The professors of literature in City College are often distinguished faculty from the doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and favor a progressive approach to critical essay writing."

Christa’s influences include Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett. Christa appreciates another aspect of the City College Program, having the opportunity to teach undergraduate writing and literature courses.

Teaching is a significant benefit which allows MFA students to develop their own knowledge and scholarship even further while developing the skills to teach once they graduate. Christa currently teaches classes in 20th Century Women Writers, Prose Workshop and Freshman Composition at City and Lehman Colleges.

She was awarded the Meyer-Cohn Graduate Essay Award 2007 and is the recent recipient of the prestigious Enhanced Chancellor Fellowship (5 year duration), which she will use to pursue her PhD in Literature at CUNY Grad Center.

Her topic is violence and desire as exposed in language/linguistic structure. Not surprisingly perhaps she includes film noir and ‘dark poetry’ as some of her interests but she is happiest ‘when learning someone's life story, including fears, hopes, traumas, confusions, ecstasies, joys, loves.’

Christa’s favorite quote from Marguerite Duras encapsulates writing and living - "Writing comes like the wind. It's naked, it's made of ink, it's the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself."