Past Event
About
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.
Featured Readers include:
Khadijah Queen is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, most recently Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a memoir about her service in the U.S. Navy alongside brief histories of maritime women, published by Legacy Lit/Hachette Books in August 2025. With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), a multi-genre anthology of speculative writing by authors from the global majority. Individual works appear in Ploughshares, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s Magazine, LitHub, The Poetry Review (UK) and widely elsewhere. In 2025 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts recognized her work with the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry. Her next book is Black Women Writers At Work in the 21st Century (Haymarket February 2027), a collection of interviews with esteemed Black women/femme authors discussing their books, creative practices, and philosophies. Queen is a Cave Canem alum, a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow, a 2022 United States Artists Disability Futures fellow, and holds a PhD in Literary Arts from University of Denver. She teaches creative writing and literary theory at Virginia Tech, and divides her time between Blacksburg, VA and Los Angeles.
Bianca Butler is an Inprint Fellow currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Houston. She is from South Florida and was raised as a neighbor to the Everglades; before you ask: yes, she was taught how to run away from alligators, and no, she does not recommend trying it. Her work does not appear anywhere—however, she also has not sent her work anywhere. She plans to change that this year.
Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023), winner of the 2024 Audre Lorde Award and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, the New England Book Award, and the Vermont Book Award. A Swedish translation of Have You Been Long Enough at Table, translated by Erik Lindman Mata, was published by Aska Förlag in February 2026. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, Outpost, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. She is a Literature & Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Houston, and a contributing editor at New England Review.
Karen Zheng is a queer, Chinese-American poet and writer. Their poetry is featured or forthcoming in Bat City Review, Harbor Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Inprint MD Anderson Foundation, and others. They have been nominated for the Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize.