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Program

The Creative Writing Program is part of the Department of English. Admission to the Program is extremely competitive, with up to 20 new students across two genres (fiction and poetry) selected each year from the hundreds of applications received from around the world. The curriculum for both Masters and PhD students emphasizes creative writing and literary study — in addition to writing their theses, all degree candidates take an ambitious array of writing workshops and critical seminars. When not in class, students enjoy no fewer than eight major reading series, including the nationally-renowned Inprint Brown series and the always exciting, student-curated Poison Girl series. And all this literary activity takes place in Houston, Texas — a city famous for its opera, its theater, its blues music, its icehouse and bar culture, its leafy neighborhoods, and its sports teams.

Although the emphasis at the Creative Writing Program is not on the commercial aspects of literature, while at UH many Program students publish work in an array of journals like The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Chicago Review, The Paris Review, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, Grand Street, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly and Gulf Coast. Students and graduates also publish books at houses like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Random House, Simon & Schuster, E.P. Dutton, HarperCollins, and W.W. Norton as well as by the Princeton Poetry Series, Carnegie Mellon Press, Wesleyan University Press, and numerous other university presses.