New professor Williams plants seeds of expansion in Rice creative writing

By Amelia Davis     9/9/25 10:44pm

After his teaching and writing residency in Leipzig, Germany ends and he’s done travelling the world for his new book tour, Phillip Williams can add yet another experience to his resume: teaching at Rice. 

For Williams, teaching is an opportunity to grow something new out of a seed of interest and creativity, for both himself and his classes. He said he appreciates the aspect of ongoing exchange where his students push him to explore new ideas and approaches, just as he helps them discover and develop their own.

“I’m really excited to return to undergraduate teaching,” said Williams, an incoming professor of creative writing. “I like that, with Rice, the majority of the students that I’m teaching, they have interests in math and science and medicine. For them, writing is … a way where I think they can be most vulnerable in their classes.”

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Williams has been teaching at the college level since 2016, only two years after earning his Masters of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Washington University. Beginning as a visiting faculty member Bennington College, Williams then went on to serve in teaching positions at Randolph College and New York University. In addition, he has a Picador guest professorship and writer residency at Leipzig University. 

For much longer than he’s been teaching, though, writing has been his passion and goal. He is the author of several poetry collections and a debut novel, “Ours,” which was rated the Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Oprah’s Book Club, ELLE magazine and more. 

“I’ve always had a very wild imagination — a lot of which was fed by video games,” Williams said. “I wanted to make my own games growing up, and so I would just write out how they would play out, what the monsters would be, what the levels would look like and things like that.” 

“I was encouraged,” he continued. “That early encouragement showed me that not only was I doing something well, but I was doing something that I enjoy, that other people could enjoy too.”

How does one juggle authorship with the demands of teaching? For Williams, the two are related. 

“I think the answer, actually, is that I want for writing to be predominant,” Williams said. “And I think through teaching, the way that happens is by helping usher in more writers into the world. So it’s not just about me creating whatever my oeuvre will be. It’s also helping students to realize if they take it seriously, here’s how you can create your own worlds. Here’s how you can make your own poems, essays, things like that, so that I’ll have future peers.”

Some of his students have already grown to be his peers and gained a foothold in the literary world in their own right. One such student, Kameryn Alexa Carter, is now a published and award-winning poet, studying poetry at the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. Williams’ teachings have stuck with her, even through the end of class. 

“Professor Williams’ pedagogy is built on a joint discovery between the facilitator and the student,” Carter wrote in a message to the Thresher. “When I was a student in his classes, there were many complex chalkboard maps of various texts — evidence that we were all contributing toward getting closer and closer to the essence of the work. He runs a highly collaborative classroom, in which each student has a responsibility to facilitate generative discussion, guided with precision by him as the instructor.”

Williams’ hiring is part of recent expansions in Rice’s creative writing program. In 2025, the English department was formally renamed as the English and Creative Writing Department to reflect some of these changes. Lacy M. Johnson, director of undergraduate studies in creative writing, said that the expansion will also include a Masters of Fine Arts program in creative writing to be introduced in the next year or two. 

“Our vision for the MFA is that it will bring more energy and grow the literary population here at Rice by bringing more mentors for our undergrads in the terms of these graduate students, but also growing the literary ecosystem here,” Johnson said. 

Johnson said there is a great deal of interest in creative writing classes — so much so that there is a lack of available classes large enough to enroll everyone interested in them. The consistent high demand has inspired the expansion in professors, in order to give more students the opportunity to take creative writing classes. 

Bringing Williams in as a professor provides not only increased creative writing class space, but also a unique point of view within the fields of poetic and fiction writing, Johnson said. In the spring, Williams will teach his first course at Rice: Experimental Black Women’s Writing. 

“He’s an incredible writer. We’re really, really lucky that he’s coming here. He is really such a virtuosic poet,” Johnson said. “We just really wanted students at Rice to be able to engage with these histories and traditions — particularly, in terms of African American poetics, Black poetics.”

Williams said he hopes to bring his own philosophy and expertise to his classes, but is also eager to see how his students grow in their own direction and follow their own inspirations. 

“I’ve been taught by many people,” Williams said. “All of that becomes a conglomerate of all of those different personalities, those different teaching styles, those different foci. They all had different things that inspired them to write and that kept them invested in the craft. I just want to be a piece of that for a student.”

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