Houston is a literary hotbed with the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, organizations like Inprint, Nuestra Palabra, Arte Publico Press, and others all calling H-town or the immediately surrounding area home. We have our fair share of successful novelists, here's our list of the top ten.

First a few words about some people who aren't on the list. Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist, is getting lots of praise for her debut novel about the personal awakening of a young typist in a New York City police department precinct in the 1920s. We like the book, but Rindell isn't on our list because while currently a doctoral student in literature at Rice University, she lives in New York.

Elizabeth Black and Tom Abrahams are both getting buzz for their recent debuts, (Black's suspense novel The Drowning House and Abrahams' Sedition: A Political Thriller.) If this were a list of the top upcoming Houston authors, they'd certainly be on it. For now, let's say they made remarkable debuts and we expect big, big things from them both.

And then there's Gwendolyn Zepeda, who has published poetry, children's books and chick-lit. One of our favorite writers, Zepeda is Houston's first ever poet laureate. Her next upcoming title, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners, is a book of poems. Ditto Sarah Cortez, whose new book is also poetry. (This is a list of novelists, sorry.)