Carlynn Houghton graduated from Chapin and earned a bachelor's degree in classics at Princeton University. She earned a master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. In 2009, she received a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award for her creative work. She was a 2018 NEH Summer Scholar at the University of Texas, El Paso, studying the border culture of the Chihuahuan Desert region. She runs a small quilting business and looks for ways to incorporate material culture into teaching literature.