University of Houston CWP

ABOUT

The University of Houston Creative Writing Program was founded in 1979 by novelist Donald Barthelme and poet Cynthia Macdonald, and it quickly became one of the more influential creative writing programs in the country, in part because of its unusual combination with a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. Housed in the English department, the program has built a poetry faculty over the decades that has included Adam Zagajewski, Mark Doty, Kevin Prufer, Nick Flynn, and Roberto Tejada, among others, and it runs Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts as a student-edited magazine tied to the program. Houston's CWP is generally grouped with the small cohort of programs (Iowa, Michener at Texas, Cornell) known for combining serious critical training with a workshop-heavy poetry curriculum, and its alumni list includes a number of poets who have gone on to significant book prizes and academic posts.

For an applicant, the practical draw is the dual-degree structure: students can pursue an MFA or continue into the PhD, with funding packages that typically include teaching assistantships covering tuition and a stipend, though exact figures and current fee waivers should be confirmed directly with the department since none were verifiable from the page pulled for this entry (the CWP site returned a connection error at time of review). Admissions follow the standard MFA/PhD cycle with a December–January deadline and require a poetry manuscript, statement of purpose, and transcripts submitted through the English department's application portal rather than a standalone submission form. As with most academic programs, response times run several months, decisions arrive in the spring, and applicants should verify current deadlines and funding details on uh.edu directly rather than relying on cached or outdated program pages.