<p>....preferably in a city.</p>
<p>If you are female, and I assume you are from your screen name, Barnard is a good writing school. Visit their web site. It's practically the local religion.</p>
<p>Yes, Barnard is a good choice. You might also consider Sarah Lawrence -- suburban but an easy commute to New York City and also NYU.</p>
<p>Brown has a strong writing program and Providence is an up and coming smaller city within easy commuter distance of Boston-Cambridge.</p>
<p>My daughter tells me that Carnegie-Mellon has an excellent writing program (Michael Chabon being the signature alum). She has writer-buddies there, who like it a lot. Lots of the superprestigious schools may not have extensive formal writing programs, but they attract a lot of aspiring writers and create good writing communities. Yale was always like that -- only a couple of "creative writing" classes in the catalogue, but writing groups and people talking about writing and getting informal help everywhere.</p>
<p>emerson in boston</p>
<p>Son is a creative writer. Agree with JHS about CMU - small but excellent creative writing department, excellent faculty. Bard is good but in the middle of nowhere. Son ended up at Johns Hopkins in their Writing Seminars major (in a city but not northeast).</p>
<p>If you're interested in single-sex schools, how about Wellesley or Simmons? Wellesley's writers include Nora Ephron and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (a/k/a Carolyn Keene of Nancy Drew fame), and Simmons alumnae writers include Elinor Lipman and Mameve Medved.</p>