Gulf Coast Reading

Gulf Coast Reading Series featuring Alyssa Box, Jacob Weil, Mathew Weitman, and featured writer Reyes Ramirez.

Alyssa Box is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of Houston where she is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow as well as a Brazos Bookstore SWL Fellow. Her work has won the Alexandra L. Rowan Memorial Foundation Writing Competition Prize in Fiction, the Sylvan N. Karchmer Prize in Fiction, the Howard Moss Prize in Poetry and can be found in The Bayou Review and The Page Gallery Journal. She loves good wine, bad TV, and lazy cats.

Jacob Weil is a poet from Boston. He recently got his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston.

Mathew Weitman’s debut poetry collection, The Campus Novel: Poems, is forthcoming with Tupelo Press. His work appears in Copper Nickel, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Award, the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and has received residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, UCROSS, and Millay Arts. He is co-editor and co-translator of Rolando Cárdenas: On the Life and Work of a Chilean Master(Pleiades Press, 2026).

Reyes Ramirez (he/him) is the 2025 – 2027 Houston Poet Laureate, as well as a writer, educator, curator, and translator of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. He authored the short story collection The Book of Wanderers (2022), a 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist, from University of Arizona Press’ Camino del Sol series,  the poetry collection El Rey of Gold Teeth (2023) from Hub City Press, a finalist for the 2024 Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and Cerveza Songs: Houston, TX (2024), a collection of craft beer poetry reviews and photography. His latest curatorial project, The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids, explores the use of grids in contemporary Houston art, literature, history, and politics. Reyes has been honored as the Winner of the 2025 Anne Frydman Translation Prize from The Hopkins Review, a 2024 Speculative Play and Just Futurities Fellow, a 2023 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellow, a 2023 Dobie Paisano Fellow, a 2022 Crosstown Arts Writer in Residence, a 2021 Interchange Artist Grant Fellow, a 2020 CantoMundo Fellow, and received awards from the BIPOC Arts Network and Fund, Houston Arts Alliance, Poets & Writers, and The Warhol Foundation’s Idea Fund.

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.