Why Doesn’t Houston Have a Writing Conference?

5/20/25 | Sean Morrissey Carroll

As a lament, a lack of creative culture in Houston is not one that can be blindly thrown about. There’s a celebrated opera house, a metastasizing museum district, and a rap scene that sets the world on edge every fifteen years or so. If one cared to do so, they could string a weekend of cultural events—lectures, exhibit openings, dance performances, plays, drag brunches, art classes, indie films, and street festivals—together from one Friday at 5 PM to Sunday night most weeks of the year. But a glaring lack in H-town for years has been the absence of a writing conference celebrating the authors and institutions that export their written words across the world. 

Is it a dearth of gumption, entrepreneurial spirit, which explains this lack? No, both in creative and business respects Houston is bursting at the seams with ambitious organizers and networkers, some of whom recognize this absence as they converse in groups at a table at Johnny’s Gold Brick or the patio behind Poison Girl. The will, the hustle to put on a large event for writers and readers is present—and the capacity to pull it off may not be long in coming.

Is it a lack of intellectual rigor? An underdeveloped cultural backbone? A dearth of institutions with the ambition to play host to authors, editors, and agents from across the country or the world? Between Rice University, the University of Houston, Texas Southern University, and other institutes of higher learning from the Woodlands to Galveston there is no absence of blocky sandstone buildings with names like Moody, Cullen, Jones, and Leland etched into their facades, brimming with graduate students, professors, and adjuncts who toil away at literary criticism and novels at all hours of the night.

Is it then a lack of ability, of foresight on the part of government and state, to prioritize lauding Houston’s accomplishments on a cultural level? Here we may find the crux of the problem. For without the greasing of wheels that lands events that large venues like the George R. Brown Convention Center, or the grants and subsidies that make it possible for organizers to devote the time and energy to make a convention happen, little can be done to grow such an idea out of its pupae stage.

We find ourselves in Houston today at just one of those stages, with the will and the audience for a writing convention tantalizingly close to realization. As April closes I look back on a month of events like the Houston Poetry and Arts Fest, the Indie Bookstore Crawl and Indie Bookstore Day, lectures by the Menil Collection and literary collaborations with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Fresh Arts, the end of the season for Inprint guest authors, and the announcement of new Poet Laureates for Houston and Texas respectively. Turning to May, graciously before the opening of hurricane season, brings events like BIPOC Bookfest, Writers Family Reunion, and the Boldface Conference, an emerging writers’ event at University of Houston.

With all this work being done, the tireless hours poured into events to celebrate Houston authors, institutions, writing programs, cultural relevance, and Houston’s celebrated diversity, whither art thou, Writing Conference?

It takes collaboration, creativity, celebration, and determination to run a conference, let alone start one. Can the various groups that foster creativity for authors in Houston come together to make this dream real? And, perhaps more importantly, can the city, county, and state make the resources available to celebrate the written word available to the collaborators who want to make it happen?

Into Solutions

This year I was pleased to attend the AWP Conference in Los Angeles, a gathering of writers and writing programs from across the country that travels to new cities every year, highlighting the local and regional writing scene as it does. It was amazing to see not only the ingenuity and creativity of authors and writing programs from universities across the country, as well as the homegrown talent LA had to offer. They also highlighted issues faced by the community in Los Angeles including a fundraiser for victims of the Palisades Fire and an increased focus on scriptwriting and filmmaking. What would that look like for Houston? Would we offer programs to aid immigrant communities who find themselves increasingly under attack by the administration? Would we focus on the effects of pollution and bring attention to how minority communities suffer the brunt of industrial pollution and therefore higher rates of cancers and other chronic illnesses? 

Would a Houston-focused writing conference have an increased presence for songwriting and spoken word? Could an appreciation for Beyonce, Lil Flip, Chamillionaire, and others increase the reach of a Houston writing conference? Given the 205 languages spoken in the metro area, encouraging storytelling and writing in other languages and preserving the legacy of diverse languages could be a unique and pertinent addition to programming any writing conference seeking to reach out and engage with the city in a deep and abiding way.

Long siloed in their own programs, what infrastructure can be constructed to bring together literary and genre fiction learning institutions that service communities long alienated from each other? Is there an inter-organizational model, a United Nations of non-profits, which can be constructed to bring together the organizers of smaller programs to facilitate larger ambitions? If any group has the capability to facilitatoe such a collaboration it would be Inprint, Houston’s longest-lived home for author appreciation, writing instruction, and collaboration with ties to bookstores, institutes of higher learning, grant-giving institutions, and our local community of readers and writers.

Lastly the ambitions to bring a writing conference to Houston would necessitate partners in business, and sponsorship with the corporations that not only fund cultural institutions like the Alley Theater and MFAH but also facilitate events that bring crowds to Houston and celebrate our city like the Houston Marathon, Houston Open, and Art Car Parade. It may be a bitter pill to swallow for idealists who would prefer to subsist on the largess of non-partisan sources of funding, but this is Texas, not Quebec, and the infrastructure to publicly fund cultural events just doesn’t exist.

So where does this leave the aspiring writer in Houston, who wants to see their city showcased, who wants to see their career grow, who wants to write and see their word spread across the globe one page at a time in the hands of readers? Know that wheels are turning, that the pupa is stirring from its slumber, and that many of us share the dreams you do as well. Visit small events, join classes and poetry readings, join a book club. Volunteer with writing non-profits that hold your best interest at heart. And keep writing!