The Newsletter of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston WWW.UH.EDU/CWP John Antel Dean, CLASS Wyman Herendeen English Dept. Chair j. Kastely CWP Director Kathy Smathers Assistant Director Cassie Colbert Program Coordinator 713.743.3015
[email protected] 2005-2006 Edition Every effort has been made to include faculty, students, and alumni news. Items not included will be published in the next edition. This was another eventful year. We had 2 wonderful residencies: one by Richard Siken and one by Grace Paley. We were an enormous presence at the AWP convention at Austin, TX in March. We had a successful inaugural editors/agents visit in early April. Our friends at Inprint celebrated their 25th anniversary, with the culminating event being a reading by the entire UH creative writing faculty. It was a special night. And we had 2 exceptional writers who were visiting faculty: Patricia Powell in the Fall Semester and Peter Turchi in the Spring. It was a good year. It was also a year marked by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of a significant portion of the Gulf Coast and a healthy scare provided by Hurricane Rita. For many of our students and faculty, certainly the Fall semester was dominated by Katrina, as they joined with many of their fellow citizens in Houston to help those displaced by the aftermath of the storms. Finally, it was a year in which several of our faculty departed from UH to take new positions elsewhere. Claudia Rankine, Kimiko Hahn, and Ruben Martinez have accepted distinguished positions at other schools.