About Us
In the late 1970s, poets Cynthia MacDonald and Stanley Plumly were named co-chairs of the Southwest’s first graduate writing program, one that received an even greater boost when New Yorker writer (and UH alum) Donald Barthelme joined the faculty in 1983.
Over the years many more internationally acclaimed writers have made the Program their home, including Mary Gaitskill, Richard Howard, Howard Moss, Linda Gregg, Adam Zagajewski, Daniel Stern, David Wojahn, Edward Hirsch, Alan Hollinghurst, Mark Strand, David Wagoner, Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Claudia Rankine, and Kimiko Hahn.
In the late 1990s US News & World Report ranked the Program second only to Iowa, and recently Poets & Writers listed UH’s Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing—one of the first in the nation—as a top five Ph.D. program.