Upcoming Event
About
Gulf Coast Reading Series featuring Emily Bludworth de Barrios, M. Cynthia Cheung, Anna Story, and Coleman Riggins.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s recent books include Rich Wife (University of Wisconsin 2025), recipient of the Four Lakes Prize, and Shopping or The End of Time(University of Wisconsin 2022), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and also holds degrees from Goldsmiths College and The College of William & Mary. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in Houston, Texas and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Her website is www.emilybludworthdebarrios.com.
M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, among others, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Texas.
Coleman Riggins (He/Him/His) is a gay poet from the small-town midwest of North Platte, Nebraska with works appearing in the Gulf Coast Review, Euphemism Literary Magazine, and Zhagaram Literary Magazine. With previous work as editor-in-chief for The Carillon and co-founder of Do Geese See God, he now works as assistant poetry editor for the Gulf Coast Review at the University of Houston where he both teaches, studies, and holds the Inprint Mary Gibbs and Jesse H. Jones Fellowship.
Anna Story is a writer from Illinois. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and serves as assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast.
Series
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.