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Creative Writing at Carolina: History

Chapel Hill has always been a magnet for writers. Some students come with the goal of becoming novelists or short story writers or poets or dramatists; others discover their vocations as undergraduates.

There was no formal creative Writing Program until 1966, but the University has had a vigorous writing tradition since the early part of this century, when "Prof" Koch, Paul Green, and Samuel Selden were working with Thomas Wolfe, Kay Kyser, Betty Smith, Frances Gray Patton, and Howard Richardson. Although their focus was on creating original "folk plays" for the Carolina Playmakers, many of these writers succeeded as novelists.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Phillips Russell taught creative writing in both the English and Journalism departments, influencing generations of reporters and broadcasters from Louis Harris to Roger Mudd. Beginning in 1947 and continuing for almost two decades, Jessie Rehder served as a one-woman program and published several books of her students' work; upon her death in 1966, Max Steele became director of Creative Writing and hired Daphne Athas and Doris Betts, still on the faculty. James Seay became directory in 1987, and Marianne Gingher stepped into the spot in 1997.

Besides the present much larger staff, teachers in the past thirty years have included William Blackburn, celebrated mentor of Reynolds Price and other writers at Duke; Carolyn Kizer, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; Lee Smith, author of eleven prizewinning books of fiction; Elizabeth Spencer, a member of teh American Institute of Arts and Letters; and many others, among them Christopher Brookhouse, Elizabeth Cox, William McCranor Henderson, Jessie Schell, and Sylvia Wilkinson.


Maintained by Daryl L. Houston