A cypress dome is a terrestrial phenomenon that occurs when a depression is shaped into the Earth, encouraging an excessive pooling of shallow water. Cypress trees thrive in these wet depressions, vigorously colonizing the pond-like areas. These water-logged craters often wear into natural circles, enabling the cypress trees to concurrently grow in a circular pattern. Thus transpires, the formation of a “cypress dome.”

In the late 1980s, Dr. Don Stap, an English professor at the University of Central Florida, appeared before the university’s provost to discuss becoming a tenured faculty member. Toward the end of the meeting, Dr. Don Stap was asked if there was anything he wanted to do to improve the English department. He suggested the creation of a literary journal on campus, written and directed entirely by students. Dr. Stap would be successful in his endeavor for both tenure and in the founding of The Cypress Dome.

The first few years of the journal were led by a small group of editors. It was in this first small group of editors that The Cypress Dome got its name. “One of [the editors] was a biology major and she mentioned something about this thing called a cypress dome,” Dr. Stap said. “It’s a particular kind of ecosystem, and it’s unique to Florida. It sounded kind of odd at first. ‘The Cypress Dome’ seemed like a strange name for a literary journal. But, the more people thought about it, the more we were interested in doing that. But that’s it; that’s all it was. It was just thinking about names and one person saying, ‘how about The Cypress Dome?’”

The first edition of The Cypress Dome—named for the one that grows naturally on UCF’s campus—was published during the 1989-90 academic year with only seven editors to edit, design, and assemble the edition. For years afterward, The Cypress Dome would continue to be an intimate project, the staff consisting of only about half a dozen. To Dr. Stap, the most rewarding part of advising the journal was watching these editors come together to publish other students’ work.

Dr. Stap continued to serve as the journal’s director until 2009, with a few exceptions. By then, the journal had become an internship class that up to 20 students could be selected for.

In 2000, The Cypress Dome Society was formed and became an official UCF student organization to bring the efforts within The Cypress Dome editorship to the larger literary arts community at UCF. Since then, the society has functioned as a liaison between the journal and students on campus, hosting monthly events, procuring funding to host each edition’s launch party, and partnering with other literary organizations on campus, such as Writers in the Sun. Recently, under the 2024-25 team of officers, The Cypress Dome Society created The Bookshelf, an initiative to bring together literary organizations on campus.