Gulf Coast Reading Series

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller, and Q Road. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (Autumn 2015). Her story “The Smallest Man in the World” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and her story “The Inventor, 1972? was awarded the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize from The Southern Review. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse (BOA Editions), which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Copper Nickel, Yale Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Recently a recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and a former Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast, Justin is pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Houston.

Tayyba Maya Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer from Houston, TX and Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast Journal. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Witness Magazine, Meridian, Juxtaprose and other journals, has been anthologized by The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is a 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction winner, Witness Magazine 2022 Literary Awards runner-up and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program where she is a candidate for an MFA in Fiction.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Recent winner of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize for Poetry, her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including APR, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and The Atlantic, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, and ESPN. Joy is the editor of An Anthology of Louisville Poets, forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2023, and currently an Inprint MD Anderson fellow in the doctoral program in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.