Gulf Coast Reading

Gulf Coast Reading Series featuring Allegra Hyde and student readers Madeleine Gaudin, El Williams III, Pritha Bhattacharyya

Allegra Hyde is the author of the story collection THE LAST CATASTROPHE, an Editors’ Choice selection for The New York Times. Her debut novel ELEUTHERIA was named a “Best Book of 2022” by The New Yorker, shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, and featured on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Her first story collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Hyde has received four Pushcart Prizes. Her work has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her fiction, nonfiction, and humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB, and other venues. Hyde has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Artist Residency, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Lucas Artist Residency Program, the Jentel Foundation, The Studios at Key West, VCCA, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.

Madeleine Gaudin is a writer, editor and educator originally from Austin, Texas. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Houston and an Inprint Brown Fellow. She is currently the Program Associate at Writers in the Schools and a Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast. 

El Williams III is a poet born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. A 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize finalist for The Georgia Review, his work has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Orion Magazine, New England Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, Community of Writers, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and the Watering Hole. He earned a dual MA/MFA from Indiana University and is currently a doctoral student studying literature and creative writing at the University of Houston.

Pritha Bhattacharyya is a Bengali American writer. She is a fiction PhD candidate and Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston and received her MFA from Boston University. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, VCCA, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Inprint Houston, Tagore Society of Houston, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She is the recipient of the 2024 Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, the 2023 Inprint Joan and Stanford Alexander Prize in Fiction, and the 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. Her work appears in The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere.

Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts presents the poetry and prose of UH graduate students, paired with prominent featured visiting writers, at Lawndale Art Center. Participating students come from the MFA and PhD programs in Creative Writing. 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.