Gulf Coast Reading with Joshua Wheeler

Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts presents readings from University of Houston Creative Writing Program graduate students and contributors to its pages. The monthly Gulf Coast Reading Series supports the journal’s mission to spotlight the work of both esteemed and emerging writers with voices as diverse as the Gulf itself.

Joshua Wheeler is from Alamogordo, New Mexico. His essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Sonora Review, PANK, and The Missouri Review. He’s written feature stories for BuzzFeed and Harper’s Magazine online and is a coeditor of the anthology We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay. He’s a graduate of the University of Southern California, New Mexico State University, and has an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. He teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University.

Joshua will be reading alongside three Gulf Coast staffers: Sonia Hamer, Kris Meikop, and Nick Rattner.

A native Houstonian, Sonia Hamer earned her BA in English from Rice University. She has been the recipient of the Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing at Rice University, the Larry McMurty Prize in Fiction, and the George Williams Prize in Non-Fiction.

Kris Meikop is an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He grew up in Helsinki, Finland, and has since lived in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, the Norwegian woods, and now Houston. After a year of graduate studies in English and literature at Åbo Akademi, Finland, he joined the MFA poetry program at U of H in 2017.

Before starting the University of Houston’s Creative Writing PhD, Nick Rattner taught English at Holyoke Community College and coached high school basketball. He is a former basketball journalist and Editor for Ugly Duckling Presse. With Marta del Pozo, he has translated the work of poets Yván Yauri and Czar Gutiérrez. Recent work can be found in The Columbia Review, Beautiful Losers, Asymptote, Exchanges, and InTranslation.