Gulf Coast Reading with Analicia Sotelo

Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin, the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay for Milkweed Editions, 2018. She is also the author of the chapbook, Nonstop Godhead, selected by Rigoberto González for a 2016 Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have also appeared in the New Yorker, Boston Review, FIELD, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Antioch Review. She is recipient of the 2016 DISQUIET International Literary Prize, a Canto Mundo fellowship, and scholarships from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Image Text Ithaca Symposium. She holds a BA in English Literature from Trinity University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston.

Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal lives as a rhyming-slogan creative activist. She is a Generation 1.5 poet (mexicanx and Chicanx), 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 M.F.A. in Writing is from California College of the Arts. She coauthored an article with a historian in the book Chicana Movidas (University of Texas, 2018). Her poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She has published translations of poetry, including Enigmas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Señal: a project of Libros Antena Books, BOMB, and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), but she mostly translates regiomontana poet Minerva Reynosa; they have a chapbook called Photograms of My Conceptual Heart, Absolutely Blind (Cardboard House Press, 2016). She also published Kilimanjaro by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press, 2018).

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, and kids’ books, including a New York Times bestseller. She is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Houston, where she is Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast.

Grace Wagner is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado Denver. She has also attended the New York Summer Writers Institute where she studied with Carolyn Forché, Cambell McGrath, Rosanna Warren, and Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. She has previously worked for Copper Nickel as Assistant Poetry Editor. Her poetry has been featured in Salmagundi Magazine which published nine of her poems in their April 2017 issue.

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.