Gulf Coast Reading

Gulf Coast Reading Series  featuring Wendy Chen and UH student readers Nick Templeton, Emilio Carrera Quiroga, and Louisa Brady.

Wendy Chen is the author of the novel Their Divine Fires (Algonquin) and the poetry collection Unearthings (Tavern Books). She is the editor of Figure 1, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly, and prose editor of Tupelo Press. Her poetry, translations, and prose have appeared in Freeman’s, A Public Space, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Her poetry translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are forthcoming in a collection titled The Magpie at Night from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2025. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Nick Templeton is a poet from the Pacific Northwest whose work centers around ideas of structure, grief, and rituals of close looking. He spent his early twenties sweeping floors at a lumber mill in Washington State, delivering mail in Minneapolis, and working in the summers as a residency assistant at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Nick is currently a poetry MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he is an Inprint Mary Gibbs and Jesse H. Jones Fellow and a
Scripts fellow in Narrative & Lyric Health.

Emilio Carrera Quiroga was born in Mexico City in 1990 and is an artist and poet. He walks on the shore of the Brays Bayou and likes to cook at home. His artistic practice relates writing and site-specific experiences with other bodies like grasshopers, sycamores, water. These processes have resulted in sculptures, installations, books, dishes, conversations, and other residues.

Louisa Brady moved to Houston from Brooklyn, NY where she worked as an elementary school science teacher. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Houston where she is a C. Glenn Cambor Fellow.

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.