This article focuses on two university programs in Spanish-language creative writing: one at the University of Iowa and the other at the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP). In order to describe the aesthetic orientations corresponding to these literary institutions, the article dialogues with two fields: studies of creative writing as a gatekeeping institution and studies of Latin American literature in relation to the concept of world literature. The first half of the text reviews the emergence of creative writing as a university discipline in the United States and its historical relationship with Latin American literature. The second half carries out a reading of textual materials produced by the two programs, offering a descriptive typology of the different positions taken toward world literature in the two programs: one that can be described as cosmopolitan and another that is best conceived as a border aesthetics.