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The Honors College

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Curriculum

The Center for Creative Work offers a curriculum that enables students to develop their creative ideas and critical skills simultaneously. All of the courses listed below are housed in The Honors College.

The Human Situation

The Human Situation emphasizes critical thinking and writing skills, as well as a focused engagement with faculty and students, that serve as a foundation for students following the Center for Creative Work's curriculum.

Creative Writing Workshops

Creative Writing Workshops emphasize the important role of reading compelling, influential fiction novelists, playwrights, and poets in the creative process. The discussion of such writers as Edward Albee, Anne Carson, and James Salter leads to specific assignments and considerations of style and technique. In the workshops, students create their own poems, short stories, and one-act plays, while at the same time reviewing each other’s work in terms of content and form. 

Beginning Creative Writing: Fiction and Poetry
Beginning Creative Writing: Poetry

Directed Study

Directed Studies offer Honors College students opportunities to focus their creative interests in unique, individual works beyond the scope of traditional workshops. Throughout the semester, the one-on-one interaction with a faculty member allows the student to further their creative studies in focused, intimate conversations directed toward the completion of a performance or project.

Writers & their Regions Course and Retreat

The Writers & Their Regions course affords upperclass students an opportunity to pursue art, dance, drama, fiction, music, and poetry while reading and studying Texas authors and traveling to selected areas in the state for weeklong artists' retreats.  

National Collegiate Honors Council Conference

Each year Honors students are invited to propose projects and research for presentation at the National Collegiate Honors Council Conference. The Center for Creative Work sponsors presentations that either showcase critical and creative student work or describe the development and administration of the CCW itself. View our 2009 presentation on the goals and benefits of the Center for Creative Work.

Senior Honors Thesis

The Center for Creative Work curriculum culminates in a two-semester Honors thesis that demonstrates the student’s creative achievement and potential and their ability to critically engage with their own work. The thesis may become a portfolio for applications to graduate programs. Take a look at excerpts from a model thesis that combines creative writing and visual art. The Senior Honors Thesis is conducted with the Office of Undergraduate Research at The Honors College at the University of Houston.