Professor Houston Wins Distinguished Teaching Award

We are proud to report that Professor Pam Houston has won the UC Davis 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching. This award recognizes outstanding teaching and dedication to student success and is selected by the UC Davis Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Awards Committee. 

Houston began work at UC Davis in 2000, and over the last twenty years has established herself as one of the most important figures in our creative writing program. She has been an inspirational teacher and mentor to a generation of students in our graduate writing workshops. Many of those students have gone on to publish their own award-winning works of fiction. 

Becky Mandelbaum--whose thesis Houston directed and who went on to win the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2018 High Plains Book Award for First Book--describes Houston as “a major influence on my life.” “I can say with full confidence,” Mandelbaum continues, “that I would not be where I am today without her.” 

Houston is the author herself of two novels, two short-story collections, and three collections of creative nonfiction. Her most recent book, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, was published by Norton in 2019. 

Please join us in congratulating Professor Pam Houston on this honor!