Upcoming Events

• Thursday, February 24, at 4pm, a celebration of Dr. Lauren Zentz’s new book, Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity: Building a Movement on Facebook (Routledge, 2021) will be held virtually. In her new book, Dr. Zentz offers unique insights into the use of Facebook after the 2016 US presidential election, interrogating how users in private groups draw on individual experiences in movement building and identity construction. 

• Friday, December 3, at 7pm, Glass Mountain, the literary journal of our undergraduate creative writing students will host the launch of their Fall 2021 Issue. The Volume 27 launch party will feature readings from Glenn Shaheen (CWP Alum), Laurie Cedilnik (CWP Alum), and Weijia Pan (MFA, Poetry). This event will be held in Midtown at Red Dwarf, located at 1011 McGowen St., 77002.    

• Monday November 29th at 9:30pm a virtual panel will celebrate renewed interest in poet Shreela Ray's body of work in association with the UH supported Unsung Masters Series and the publication of the book Shreela Ray: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Panelists include Kazim Ali, Vandana Khanna, Tishani Doshi and Rohan Chetri.

• Thursday, November 4, from  6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. the Department of English will host a ceremony and reception to honor the inductees of Sigma Delta Tau. The event will be held in the atrium of the A.D. Bruce Religion Center.                                                                                                                             
• Friday, September 3^rd at 7pm Central, a virtual discussion about the poet Marianne Moore between Dr. Elizabeth Gregory and poet Jennifer Chang will be hosted by Brazos Bookstore in honor of Dr. Gregory's new book on Moore’s later career, Apparition of Splendor: Marianne Moore Performing Democracy through Celebrity, 1952-1970 (U Delaware Press). 

Faculty, Students, and Alumni In the News 

• Ph.D. student Ibrahim Badshah's essay "Translation Theory and Praxis in East and West: The Case of Saud Al-Sanousi’s Saaq al-BambooSaaq al-Bamboo" appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics.

• Publisher Rowman & Littlefield has published an anthology honoring the lifework of UH comparative literature scholar Dr. Zamora, From the Americas to the World: Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora. The anthology traces artistic and cultural pathways that connect Latin American literature and culture to the Americas, and to the world beyond.

• Professor francine j. harris’ poem “Burden, old story.” was featured by the Academy of American Poets as the poem of the day, on October 6th, 2021. Professor Roberto Tejada’s poem “Night Festival” was featured on September 7th, 2021. Ph.D. student in Literature and Creative Writing Joy Priest’s poem “Looking for the Beautiful Things” was also selected as the poem of the day this past summer. 

• Dr. Roberto Tejada has been awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship for his poetry, chosen through a peer-review process, recipients are “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship . . . and creation”.

• Poetry professor francine j. harris has won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for her third collection of poetry Here is the Sweet Hand (FSG, 2020).

• Three of Dr. Laura Turchi's undergraduate students have had their profiles' of poets published as part of National Poetry Month’s Poet of the Day series from NCTE. Congratulations to Lindsay Bien who profiled poet Angelina Weld Grimké, to Natalie Gibson who profiled poet Sarah Kay, and to Mariana Ordoñez who profiled Javier Zamora. 

• Professor Kevin Prufer and alumni Bryan Washington (B.A.) and Tony Diaz (Ph.D.) have been named 2021 honorees of The Texas Institute of Letters. They join the ranks of the honor society that celebrates Texas literature and recognizes distinctive literary achievement.

• Professor francine j. harris' poetry collection Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020) shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Dr. Cedric Tolliver's monograph Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2020) named to the American Library Association's Choice Outstanding Academic Titles (OAT) list for 2020.

• Alumna Novuyo Rosa Tshuma wins prestigious 2020 Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship for Fiction.

• Alumnus Jericho Brown Wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection The Tradition.

• Alumnus Bryan Washington’s short story collection Lot Wins the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize.

English Department Publications

Forum: The Newsletter of the UH Department of English

• Fall 2021

Creative Writing Program: Spotlight 

• December 2020

• November 2020

• October 2020