Posts Tagged: University of Houston Creative Writing Program

Houston writer Jennifer Staff Johnson gives first public reading

October 12, 2016, by

Jennifer Staff Johnson.689f418bce3e5f33635012ea502526aa21The Gulf Coast Journal’s Reading Series presents writers from the University of Houston’s nationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program, as well as renowned writers whose work has appeared in the magazine. This Friday, the Series presents Lisa Olstein, Henk Rossouw, Corey Campbell, and Jennifer Staff Johnson at Rudyard’s Pub in Montrose. Reading starts at 7 pm.

This week marks the very first public reading for Jennifer, who is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at UH. She sat down with Inprint blogger Charlotte Wyatt to discuss her work and how Houston has shaped her writing.

CHARLOTTE: This is your first — okay, alright, second reading ever, but your first reading was Wednesday night as part of the Poetry & Prose series through UH. How did you choose what pieces to read this week? How did you prepare? Continue reading →

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Writing Under the Same Roof: Two Houston Writers Talk Fiction, Love, and Utopia

September 26, 2016, by

PrintAllegra Hyde and Alex McElroy met while completing their MFAs in Fiction at Arizona State University. They married upon graduating in spring 2015, and then spent the following year in Bulgaria, where Allegra completed a Fulbright Grant. This past summer, they settled in Houston, so that Alex could begin studies as a PhD candidate in Fiction at the University of Houston.

Allegra’s first book, Of This New World, recently won the 2016 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award. She will be launching the book this Monday, October 3rd, at 7:00 PM at Brazos Bookstore. To mark the occasion, Allegra and Alex sat down to discuss the collection, writing as a couple, and their burgeoning love for Houston.

ALEX McELROY: What’s it like to bring out your first book in a city that’s still very new to you? Continue reading →

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Bon Voyage, Professor Kastely!

September 19, 2016, by

J. Kastely with studentsOn August 24th, the UH Creative Writing Program started things off for the Fall 2016 semester by allowing long time chair, J. Kastely, to quit his job.

Kastely, who suffered through what must have seemed like a million (it was only 14) years of whiny writers of the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty persuasion, was ceremonially unchained and allowed to roam free from his office, to pursue his varied philosophical interest.

The Creative Writing Program was reluctant to let Kastely go, because Professor J. Kastely was truly excellent at this job—no joke, sublimely so—and none of the subjects interviewed for this blog post could imagine a Creative Writing Program without him. And yet novelist Alexander Parsons has generously agreed to step into that role, at least until one of our bear traps proves successful.

Continue reading →

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To get the news from poems: Why Sara Cress’s “Breaking Poems” project is worth reading closely

March 30, 2016, by

12884453_10153948657976390_1763700063_nEvery night before bed, Sara Cress writes poetry in response to the headlines she’d spent the day surrounded by in her job. She posts most of her poems to her Tumblr site, but she has also published two slim volumes of them: Breaking Poems and 2015 Yearbook.

She identifies with a migratory songbird, “a mere puff,” she writes. She grieves the attacks in Paris. She, like most of the Internet, laments the revelation that bacon is very likely carcinogenic.

Cress, who received her degree in creative writing from the University of Houston, is making two essential assumptions. One is that poetry has something to say to the news. You’re probably familiar with that William Carlos Williams phrase — if you’ve shopped at Barnes & Noble, you’ve seen it on a tote bag: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” For Cress, it seems so. There is something about poetry — its complexity, its empathy — worth taking to the news of the day. The day, that is, we live in now: a day on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, scrolling, scrolling, where authority is dictated by “pageviews” and trending topics are flimsy as fame. “Poetry is the way I’ve always responded to sadness and frustration,” writes Cress in an email. “I started writing [the breaking poems] for me. … But a few months in I started to see that I was interpreting the news in a way that perhaps made it more palatable and heightened emotions about worn topics.”

It reminds me of something that James Kastely, Director of the Creative Writing Program at UH, once wrote: ““If there is any problem it is not that there is an excess of rhetoric but rather that there is not enough.” Continue reading →

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Inprint awards more than $200,000 in prizes and fellowships to creative writing students in Houston

March 2, 2016, by

Who will be the James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham, or J. D. Salinger of this generation? For Inprint, supporting the next generation of great writers is crucial to helping us fulfill our mission of inspiring readers and writers.

Inprint is proud to be awarding $201,500 in direct support during the 2015-2016 academic year to some of the nation’s top emerging creative writers in Houston. The money is awarded as prizes and fellowships to University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP) graduate students and a prize for an undergraduate at Rice University.

This year marks Inprint’s highest single-year amount of support for these creative writing students. Since 1983, Inprint has provided more than $3 million dollars in direct support to more than 500 students. Recipients of these fellowships and prizes are changing the face of contemporary literature and have gone on to publish books, win literary awards, serve as educators, and enrich the cultural life of Houston and other communities nationwide. The collaboration between Inprint and the UH Creative Writing Program—a community-based literary arts nonprofit and a university-based creative writing program—is unique in the country, benefiting both the writers and the Houston community. Continue reading →

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A whirlwind of poetry and translation comes to Houston

January 21, 2016, by

Kim Kyung-JuThe wonderful thing about literature is that you can travel the world without stepping outside your door. Houston’s diverse literary community celebrates that fact by presenting many authors from different parts of the world.

On Friday, January 22, to celebrate the English-language version of his bestselling collection, Korean poet Kim Kyung-Ju commences his debut tour through the United States at Asia Society Texas Center, in collaboration with Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Kim will read in concert with his Tucson-born, Seoul-based translator Jake Levine. The multi-lingual program also features Luisa Muradyan and Henk Rossouw, students from the Creative Writing Program at University of Houston (both are Inprint fellowship recipients), presenting translation and transnational work in Ukrainian and languages of South Africa, respectively.

A power house, Kim Kyung-Ju is one of the most distinguished young writers in Korea. His first volume of poetry, I Am a Season that Does Not Exist in the World, has sold over 20,000 copies. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translation. Additionally, his poetic-dramas have been performed in Seoul and New York. Apart from writing, Kim has curated several art exhibitions, is the organizer of the Penguin Rhyme Club, and produces inter-disciplinary, collaborative projects with musicians and artists. Most recently he took part in the poetic hip-hop project Poetic Justice with the acclaimed Korean rapper MC Meta. Continue reading →

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Geoff Dyer and the Art of the Great Day

May 20, 2015, by

RM4_5819May 12th was balmy—not as hot as usual in Texas in May.  You could sit outside and feel the day slipping away. That is always a good feeling if you have done something interesting.

I mostly graded papers.  Some of it was interesting.  This is how it goes.  Still, I wanted a little more from my daylight buck.  I sat outside at Bayou Place looking straight at the Wortham Center waiting for seven o’clock to roll around.  It would be the final reading for the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.  I was excited:  nonfiction by the English writer Geoff Dyer.  I felt like I had read a lot of fiction during the day: “Gatsby enjoys socializing with the Buchanans and finds them so interesting!”

And, some of the English: well, dicey.

I thought: how do you grade writing anymore anyway?  I thought: how do you know if you have had a great day?  I thought: how do you know if you know what you are doing?  How do you know if you don’t?

It’s more about how you feel at that moment, right?  Well if you want to learn how to whip that up, and get it down, there are worse places to go than the writing of Geoff Dyer, and lucky for me, that is exactly where I went.  He read from his newish book Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush.  Continue reading →

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A Houston Conference for Emerging Writers, BoldFace 2015

May 14, 2015, by

Boldface 2015When we think of writing conferences, we always think they take place somewhere in the Northeast, along a beautiful coast, in a remote location, or in a popular tourist destination. Houstonians however do have access to one of the best writing conferences right here in Houston.

Boldface is a summer writing conference run by Glass Mountain, the University of Houston undergraduate literary journal. The journal caters to undergraduates across the nation, but the Boldface Conference is open to any emerging writer who is interested in signing up. Inprint blogger Sara Balabanlilar interviewed Joseph Roberts, the head fiction editor of Glass Mountain, to get more information about this year’s Boldface Conference. The visiting writers to the conference include poet Blas Falconer, non-fiction writer Gail D. Storey, and novelist Coert Vorhees. To register and learn more about the Boldface Conference click here. 

SARA: Tell us a little bit about Boldface.

JOSEPH: Boldface is a weeklong conference for undergrads and local emerging writers. The first Boldface was in June 2009. This year the conference will last from May 18th to the 22nd. The conference itself consists of various writerly things such as workshops (run by UH’s own Creative Writing Program graduates), Master classes (also run by grad students) where all sorts of different aspects of writing are taught or discussed, to visiting writers and open mics throughout the week. Continue reading →

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Another Country, Near and Far: Henríquez and James Read in H-Town

April 28, 2015, by

RM3_7327Once again, I am running late, headlights mocking me as I creep up 59.  But then, a break, and I fly to Louisiana Street and head to a restaurant for Inprint’s Books & Bellinis, a young professionals mixer, before the Inprint reading.  My Multicultural Literature students are coming tonight, too.  We are all excited: we do not know these writers reading tonight.

What I mean is that we don’t know them yet.

I meet some new friends—or writers I know from Facebook–in person, and let me tell you, in person is better.  Two of my friends win books at the party and I feel happy for them:  what is better than a new book, by a new writer, that you have never read?

Well, not much.

I walk with my friend Elizabeth to The Wortham Center and see my students.  They look so grown up to me—we have read a lot of books together.  Some of them are graduating in May.  I am not sure if I am ready for it, not sure if I am ready for them to emigrate from the benevolent despotism of my classroom to The Next Big Thing.  No wonder people stay in college forever.  There are worse countries to visit, hang around, linger.  Everyone migrates somewhere; even the suburbs of Houston seem like independent states sometimes, each a new country, with languages that I cannot recognize at times.  That is because so many people from so many different countries come to Houston:  it is ever changing, kaleidoscopic, never boring. Continue reading →

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A literary recap of MenilFest 2015

April 25, 2015, by

IMG_4458Although the weather was cloudy and grey, spirits were bright at MenilFest 2015 last Saturday. MenilFest is a multi-pronged cultural celebration, combining an indie book fair, literary lectures, musical performances, film screenings, and more.

The indie book fair flanked the northern, eastern, and southern sides of The Menil Collection museum building, providing an opportunity for local ‘zines, publishers, authors, and nonprofit organizations (I spied Friends of the Houston Public Library, the Hare Krishna Cultural Center, and the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, among others) to display their wares and welcome conversation.

There was printed matter for everyone—romances, poetry, mysteries, cookbooks, Spanish-language, spiritual, YA, and even some book-related crafts.

Brazos Bookstore touted literature by Houston-based authors, like Nick Flynn, Tony Hoagland, Lacy Johnson, Thomas McNeely, (and, in full disclosure, moiself). I spoke to Benjamin Rybeck, events coordinator, about the store’s involvement with MenilFest over the years. “We are first and foremost a community bookstore,” he explained. “We come every year to meet our neighbors.” Continue reading →

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