All Student Success Letters

Alex Foster

Dear Gotham,

In the spring of 2019, I moved to New York to attend NYU’s MFA program in creative writing. The program wasn’t starting until September, and I wanted to polish some writing before starting, so for the summer I enrolled in Gotham’s ten-week Fiction Writing II course with Seth Fried. The class turned out to be not only terrific preparation for graduate school—it was also a most welcoming introduction to the New York writing community.

Seth accommodated a wide range of genres—much wider than generally finds receptive readers in a university-based workshop. He was never dismissive of works for being too artsy or not artsy enough. The classroom discussions were richer for it, and the cross-pollination made our work stronger. In one memorable class, he taught how the same plotting structures can be used to scaffold rarified literary works just as well as action blockbusters.

The students were friendly and devoted to their craft. Those ten weeks left me with one of my best friends in New York—a terrific and now accomplished writer himself.

These lessons and lasting friendships helped me finish my debut novel, Circular Motion. Published by Grove Press in May 2025, the book follows two outcasts as the planet starts to spin faster and faster. It blends the seriousness of reflective literary fiction with the drama that I love in science fiction and apocalypse literature.

Thank you, Gotham.

Sincerely,

Alex Foster

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You can learn more about Alex and his writing here.