Ecopoetics on the Gulf reading will feature poetry, cinepoems, and paintings by graduate students enrolled in the Ecopoetics on the Gulf course led by UH CWP faculty member Martha Serpas.

Chelsea B. DesAutels serves as poetry editor of Gulf Coast. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, The Texas Review, and others. She is the recipient of the Virginia Reiser Memorial Scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Houston, where she is an MFA candidate.

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s poems can be found in concis, Grist, Four Way Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review and elsewhere, and a non-fiction/poetry hybrid is online at Pacifica Lit Review. He is the digital nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast and a PhD student at the University of Houston.

Josie Mitchell is in her third year of her MFA in fiction at the University of Houston. She is a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast and student advisor to the UH undergraduate literary magazine, Glass Mountain. She is from San Diego, California, and is at work on an apocalyptic story collection set there. It’s called, Fuck You, El Niño.

Michelle Orsi grew up in Spokane, Washington, and currently serves as an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. She is an MFA student at the University of Houston.

Sam Thilén is an MFA candidate at University of Houston and an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. She studied English and Spanish at the University of Florida, where she served as editor-in-chief for the undergraduate literary magazine Tea. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tea, The Fine Print, Prairie, and The Boston Review. Sam loves Finland, word origins, and petting other people’s dogs.

Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal lives as a rhyming-slogan creative activist. She is a Generation 1.5 poet (mexicana and Chicana), a translator, a sonic-improv collaborator, and an instructor of English. She is a Ph.D. student in the Creative Writing Program at University of Houston. Her poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review and the Texas Review. She is the translator of Enigmas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Señal: a project of Libros Antena Books, BOMB, and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and Photograms of My Conceptual Heart, Absolutely Blind, by Minerva Reynosa (Cardboard House Press, 2016).

Lani Yu is a first-generation Chinese-American poet. A third-year poetry MFA student at the University of Houston, she also serves as an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts and teaches English. She grew up in Orlando and graduated from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Psychology. She was a semifinalist for the 2016 DISQUIET Literary Prize Contest, and her work has appeared in University of Florida’s TEA literary magazine. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript that explores complex family dynamics, cultural identity, and the lyric self.

Roberto Tejada is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing with a joint appointment in the department of Art History. He is the author of poetry collections that include Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010), Mirrors for Gold (2006), and Todo en el ahora (2015).

He founded and co-edited the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, a multilingual annual of poetry and translation (1991-2014), and is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009); a monograph on pioneering Chicana conceptual artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), and such catalog essays as “Los Angeles Snapshots” in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011).

His poetry and creative research develop the relationship between sight, display, public speech, and spectacle; he is at work on a trans-American project that examines specific art scenes of 1960s-1970s Los Angeles, 1980s-1990s Mexico City, and present-day São Paulo.

Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Loving Day, Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

He is a Professor at the UH Creative Writing Program.

Laura Biagi, MFA Fiction
Laura Biagi grew up in small-town Kentucky and earned her BA in Creative Writing and Anthropology from Northwestern University. After college she spent eight years working in New York at a literary agency, where she represented literary fiction, nonfiction, YA, and children’s books. She likes hot weather and the stars.

Theodora Bishop, PhD Poetry
Theodora Bishop’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, and Short Fiction (England), among other journals, anthologies, and exhibits. A Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee, Bishop was the winner of The Cupboard’s 2015 contest for her short story chapbook, Mother Tongues, judged by Matt Bell. Theodora Bishop holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston. Her novella, On the Rocks, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press.

Justin Jannise, PhD Poetry
Justin Jannise grew up in Liberty, Texas, and has lived in Houston since 2015. He studied poetry at Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Justin’s work has appeared in Columbia Journal, the Yale Review and The Awl. He likes flamingos and tastefully executed side-eye.

His poetry and creative research develop the relationship between sight, display, public speech, and spectacle; he is at work on a trans-American project that examines specific art scenes of 1960s-1970s Los Angeles, 1980s-1990s Mexico City, and present-day São Paulo.

Ji yoon Lee, PhD Poetry
Ji yoon Lee is a poet and translator whose most recent publication is Poems of Kim Yideum, Kim Haengsook, and Kim Minjeong, the collection of contemporary Korean poetry, for which she collaborated with Jake Levine, Don mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson (Vagabond Press, 2017). She translated Korean feminist poet Kim Yideum’s poetry with Don mee Choi and Johannes Göransson, the collection of which was published as Cheer Up, Femme Fatale (Action Books, 2015). She is also the author of Foreigner’s Folly (Coconut Books, 2014), Funsize/Bitesize (Birds of Lace, 2013), and IMMA (Radioactive Moat, 2012). She is the winner of the Joanna Cargill prize (2014), and her manuscript was a finalist for the 1913 First Book Prize (2012). She was born in South Korea, and immigrated to a small town in East Texas alone as a teen. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, lived in NYC, and moved back to Texas, the land that keeps pulling her back.

David Nikityn, MFA Fiction
Dave Nikityn was born and raised in rural New Jersey where he grew up playing baseball and basketball. As an undergraduate, he studied radio broadcasting, philosophy, and creative writing. More recently, he has summited Mount Everest twice (once blindfolded), wandered the streets of Bangladesh alongside magician David Blaine in search of ancient snake-charming techniques, and safely landed a critically damaged Boeing 747 jetliner after both pilot and co-pilot had passed out due to shock. He is also the fictitious author of the fictitious bestselling guide to life: Lying: The Fast Track to Impressing Friends and Colleagues Alike.

Paige Quiñones, PhD Poetry
Paige Quiñones received her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a poetry editor for The Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Juked, McSweeney’s, Muzzle Magazine, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poem “Summer, or Daughters I Haven’t Met” was a finalist for Best of the Net 2015. She is currently a graduate fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston.

Annie Shepherd, PhD Fiction
Annie Shepherd taught ESL in China for two years before returning to her home state of Texas to obtain an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University. Prior to entering the PhD program in fiction at University of Houston, she taught writing and literature at Texas State University and University of the Incarnate Word. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in North American Review, The Greensboro Review, and North Dakota Quarterly.

Brendan Stephens, PhD Fiction
Brendan Stephens received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. His work is forthcoming or published in the Southeast Review, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, he is a PhD student at the University of Houston.

Kaj Tanaka, PhD Fiction
Kaj Tanaka’s stories have been featured in Longform, selected for Wigleaf’s Best (Very) Short Fictions, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the nonfiction editor for BULL Magazine.

Richard Thompson, MFA Poetry
Richard Thompson grew up in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. He has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in Montreal. He won the 2016 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award from the Southern Indiana Review, and his poems (some of which do not relate to farming accidents) have also appeared in Empirical Magazine, The Rectangle, and The Avenue.

Ayokunle Falomo is: a Nigerian, & a poet – who uses his pen as a shovel to unearth those things that make us human. He is a lover: of almonds, the color blue, hymns, grapes, & conversations. He is a TEDx speaker and an author, of the collection of poems – thread, this wordweaver must! & of kin.DREAD – an upcoming collection of poems and thoughts that seeks to explore the relationship between our fears and those closest to us. He is also a dreamer and an American. He enjoys walking. & talking to himself.

Gerald Smith grew up in Yokosuka, Japan as well as San Antonio, Texas. He mainly writes absurd short fiction or free verse poetry. Currently, he is studying Creative Writing and French at the University of Houston. He has traveled through much of western Europe on a couple of occasions, but mainly travels to the Netherlands and France when he gets the chance.

Aries Jones is a former Editor of Glass Mountain. In spring of 2016, she graduated from the University of Houston with a BA in English and minors in Marketing and Psychology. Currently, she is the Content Director at Adit, a digital marketing agency in Houston. When she’s not busy typing away at a keyboard, you’ll find her scribbling in a journal instead-or playing Breath of the Wild. Otherwise, you may run into her while she’s got her head in a book.

Mai Tram Nguyen graduated in 2010 with a double major in Education and Psychology. After a few years of teaching, she joined the staff of Glass Mountain as Co-Managing Editor in 2015 and remains an enthusiastic supporter of the magazine. She is currently running a blog, mostly about books, and is part owner of a start-up baking business. She is an avid collector of children’s books and corny jokes.

Shaina Frazier is a half black and Filipino fiction writer based in Houston, Texas who likes to write about supernatural stuff like ghosts, or just regular stuff like “the struggle,” all while trying to incorporate a little humor here and there. She graduated from UH in the spring of 2015 and is a former Co-Managing Editor of Glass Mountain. She was recently laid off from the public accounting firm that botched the Oscars this year, but she’s not tripping on it. Her piece “Ill Will” is forthcoming in the 1st edition of Found Me magazine.

Tony Hoagland‘s fifth and most recent book of poems, Application for Release from the Dream, was published by Graywolf Press in 2015. Other collections include What Narcissism Means to Me, Unincorporated Persons of the Late Honda Dynasty, and Donkey Gospel. He has also published two collections of essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, and Twenty Poems That Could Save America. He has received the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the James Laughlin Prize, fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the O.B. Hardisson Prize. His next collection, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, is scheduled for publication by Graywolf in 2018.

Kevin Prufer‘s newest books are Churches (2014), named by The New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of the year; In a Beautiful Country (2011), a Rilke Prize and a Poets’ Prize finalist; and National Anthem (2008), named one of the best five books of poetry of the year by Publishers Weekly. His newest poems can be found in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and The 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology.