Upcoming Events

• The annual Department of English Honors Day celebration and award ceremony will be held virtually on Tuesday, May 4th 2021 from 10 a.m.- 12 p.m. (CST).  A range of awards and prizes will be presented to our outstanding undergraduate and graduate students. The invited speaker is UH English alum Russell Contreras, the Justice and Race reporter at news outlet, Axios, covering the policies and agencies at the heart of the administration of justice and how it impacts people of color. 

Faculty, Students, and Alumni In the News

• 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

• Winter 2020

• Fall 2020

Creative Writing Program: Spotlight 

• December 2020

• November 2020

• October 2020