Today, Inprint is at the center of Houston’s vibrant literary community, presenting and championing diverse programming for thousands of readers and writers. For forty years, Inprint has enriched the city’s intellectual capital and made the literary world accessible to all Houstonians.

Inprint was founded in 1983 by a group of community leaders who sought to address a need in Houston for greater support and appreciation of the literary arts. The founders—C. Glenn Cambor, Karl Kilian, and Gay Block—soon recruited others to the cause. They envisioned Houston as a city of letters, a place where writers come to study, work, and make a life for themselves, thereby enhancing the city and making the power of the written word vital to its citizens.

The founders knew that supporting the nascent and already distinguished University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP) was crucial to realizing this vision, and the support of the UH CWP became the raison d’être for Inprint, resulting in a powerful synergy connecting a literary arts nonprofit organization, a university-based creative writing program, and a major American city. Since its inception, Inprint has provided fellowships, prizes, employment, and other support to UH CWP students of more than $4.5 million, enabling the university to recruit some of the country’s most talented emerging writers to live and work in Houston.

This history of support has been defined by several major events. In 1991, Inprint was given a $1 million anonymous gift to establish and maintain an endowment fund for UH CWP student fellowships in honor of founding Inprint President C. Glenn Cambor. In that same year, further fundraising provided the underwriting for an Inprint office and professional staff. Until that time, Inprint had been run entirely by volunteers.

The first juried prizes to be established by Inprint for UH CWP students were the Donald Barthelme Fellowships, commemorating the great fiction writer and native Houstonian who served on the UH CWP faculty from 1980 until his death in 1989. In 1999, Inprint embarked on a major fundraising effort, the Inprint Literary Capital Campaign, which raised more than $3 million from foundations, corporations, and individuals to establish the $1.5 million Cullen Foundation Chair in Creative Writing (held jointly by fiction writers Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell) and nine named endowed graduate student fellowships at the UH CWP. The campaign also provided funding for three Inprint community programs for five years.

A few years later, Inprint established additional juried prizes for mid-career graduate students at the UH CWP, including the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry, the Diana P. Hobby Prize, the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, the Joan and Stanford Alexander Fiction Prize in honor of Andrea White, and the Robert J. Sussman Fiction Prize in honor of Bob Sussman. In 2013, three additional prizes—the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prizes—were established to honor the memory of long-time Inprint Board member Marion Barthelme. These prizes are awarded each year to two UH CWP graduate students and to one graduating senior from Rice University. In 2016, the Edgar M. Larsen Fellowship was established to pay tribute to long-time Inprint Board member and Inprint’s pro-bono investment manager Ed Larsen. Thanks to Inprint’s support, the UH CWP continues to be one of the nation’s most renowned creative writing programs, with a growing international reputation.

As Inprint has blossomed, it has nurtured a vibrant literary life in Houston among diverse social, racial, and economic groups by launching and developing several essential literary performance and educational programs. Inprint’s flagship performance program is the prestigious Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, founded by the UH CWP in 1980. Now in its 42^nd season, the Series is a nationally renowned literary showcase that has presented the world’s leading writers—close to 400 since 1980, including winners of 12 Nobel Prizes, 70 Pulitzer Prizes, 65 National Book Awards, 54 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and 17 Booker Prizes, as well as 21 U. S. Poet Laureates.

The Inprint Cool Brains! Reading Series, which presents the nation’s top middle-grade writers in Houston free of charge, was officially added to Inprint programs in 2007. Working closely with school districts and libraries throughout the Houston area, Cool Brains! provides a way for young readers and their families to meet their favorite authors and build a lifelong love of reading and writing. To date, Cool Brains! has presented more than 40 of the most acclaimed and beloved children’s writers, focusing on readers ages 8-12.

Throughout the 1990s, other Inprint literary performance programs enriched Houston’s cultural life. From 1993 – 2000, Inprint’s Literary Conversations presented major writers and other artists speaking on poetry, fiction, playwriting, the personal essay, biography and memoir, science writing, and music and literature, in collaboration with many other local arts organizations. From 1995 to 2003, Inprint collaborated with Brazos Bookstore and other cultural groups on a number of marathon readings featuring dozens of community members reading aloud and celebrating such great works as Dante’s Inferno, Joyce’s Ulysses, Beowulf, Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

In 2006, Inprint launched a Studio Series featuring emerging writers from across the country in public readings and community outreach events. Each of these writers also held craft talks with graduate students at the UH Creative Writing Program, providing valuable mentoring at a time when the faculty was short-handed. Eight writers took part in the Studio Series over two years. The program was discontinued due to the success of faculty hiring at UH.

Inprint’s literary educational programs play a key role in developing a community of writers in Houston, today offering more than 40 writing workshops per year that serve the general public, senior citizens, K-12 teachers, healthcare workers, and others with intensive writing instruction. Inprint’s Writers Workshops, named Houston’s “Best Place for Aspiring Writers” by the Houston Press, have since 1991 provided local writers with 6-10 week workshops that help them to hone their skills and prepare work for publication, in workshops led by published writers including many students and alumni from the UH CWP. Limited to 12 people per class, Inprint Writers Workshops provide an invaluable and in-depth workshop experience. One and two-day intensive workshops have also been offered to increase our reach. In conjunction with the workshops, Inprint also offered The Business of Writing from 1996 to 2002, a one-day conference presenting several of the nation’s leading editors, agents, and writers that was designed to provide aspiring writers with an understanding of how to get their work published.

From 1995 through 2014, Inprint’s after-school Youth Writing Program was offered at Project Row Houses, SHAPE Community Center, and Finnigan Park Community Center, providing an invaluable after-school activity free of charge for at-risk community school children. Since 1996, Inprint Senior Memoir Workshops have provided senior citizens from across Houston with an activity that revives family memories, preserves community histories, and gives seniors a vital sense of accomplishment and self-worth. Offered over the years at senior centers in different parts of the city, from the north side and Fifth Ward to the East End, these nine-month workshops, led by community writers and UH CWP alumni and students, culminate each year with the publication of an anthology of the participants’ work and a community celebration. In 2014, a new senior workshop was begun at Amazing Place, a day center for adults with mild to moderate dementia.

Inprint’s Teachers-as-Writers Workshops were founded in 1997 to fill a gap in teacher training, providing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction workshops that sharpen the skills of K-12 teachers. These tuition-free 8-10 week workshops, which serve 75 teachers per year from throughout the Houston area, are based on the idea that better writers make better writing teachers. Teachers learn new techniques for the classroom, and the workshops also are personally enriching, which aids in retention and helps teachers to keep their creative juices flowing.

After exploring possible collaborations with the medical community in Houston, Inprint established Life Writing Workshops at Houston Methodist in spring 2007. These workshops, led by UH Creative Writing Program graduate students and alumni, serve employees at the Texas Medical Center at all levels, from doctors to orderlies to the lobby pianist. This program is a model of exceptional, meaningful, and innovative workforce development. The interdisciplinary approach embraced in the workshops, combining healthcare and creative writing, provides uncommon opportunities for professional and personal enrichment.

In 2008, Inprint established the Inprint Poetry Buskers Program, which sends poets with typewriters to various festivals and events throughout the Houston area. The poetry buskers write free poems on demand about topics chosen by the recipient, taking poetry out to the streets and inspiring the public with spontaneous whimsy, creativity, and skill. Buskers write in both English and Spanish and are primarily students and alumni of the UH CWP.

In 2018, Inprint launched Ink Well, a podcast that focuses primarily on Latinx and other writers of color, in collaboration with Tintero Projects. Other collaborative efforts with Tintero Projects have included bilingual workshops and readings.

In 2019, Inprint started a Spanish reading series Escritores en la casa, in collaboration with the UH Spanish Creative Writing PhD Program. The series is free and open to the public, and features a writer reading from their work, followed by Q&A and a book signing.

Inprint’s programs, events, and educational activities have achieved recognition in Houston and beyond. According to the late Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike, “The good folks of Houston should be grateful to have such an institution operating in their midst.” Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, speaks to Inprint’s value and uniqueness: “Inprint gives a kind of center to literary life in Houston, with its tentacles going out in different directions…. I don’t think there is anything like Inprint in the country, and I’ve been to a lot of cities. Believe me, I’d like to find it.” Inprint was twice ranked #1 in the Texas Commission on the Arts competition for literary grants and received a TCA Star Award for excellence in marketing. For more than a decade, Inprint has received national endorsement in the form of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, the Inprint Cool Brains! Reading Series, and Inprint Writers Workshops have been voted “Best of Houston” by the Houston Press on several occasions; H-Texas magazine chose Inprint Writers Workshops as the city’s “Best Adult Education Program”; and the Houston Chronicle singled out Cool Brains! for bringing the “superstars of children’s and young-adult literature to town, making it a truly cool addition to the literary scene.” Houston, thanks to Inprint’s efforts, is now nationally recognized as a literary center.

Inprint is not currently hiring.

Inprint is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and an equal opportunity employer that values workplace diversity, and we encourage applications for our jobs, internships, and volunteer positions from all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or age.