Reading Series November 2021

November 19 2021

Lawndale Art Center
4912 Main St.
Houston, TX 77002
07 00 pm

7 PM CDT - Gulf Coast Reading Series event featuring Saddiq Dzukogi, KT Herr, Annie Shepherd, and Obi Umeozor.

We're excited to be bringing the 2021–2022 Gulf Coast Reading Series back to Lawndale Art Center and back to real life. Please join us for our third event of this season, on November 19th at 7pm (doors open at 6:30). RSVP on Facebook (optional).

Please note:
Masks will be required while indoors at this event.
Social distancing is encouraged.

This event is produced in partnership with Lawndale Art Center.
 

Saddiq Dzukogis poetry collection Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press 2021) was named one of 29 of the best poetry collections by Oprah Daily. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and other literary journals and magazines. He was a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships and Grants from Nebraska Arts Council, Pen America, Obsidian Foundation, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he is a PhD student and serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Prairie Schooner.

KT Herr (she/they) is a queer poet, musician, and curious person from Lancaster, PA. Their work is published or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Frontier, Anomaly, and elsewhere. While earning their MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, they were co-director of the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival and recipient of the 2019-2020 Thomas Lux Award. Currently, they are a C. Glenn Cambor fellow in the University of Houston's Literature and Creative Writing PhD program, a board member with Four Way Books, and a long-distance bonus parent.

Annie Shepherd is a teaching fellow at the University of Houston creative writing PhD program, concentrating in fiction. Before coming to Houston, she taught ESL in China for two years and earned an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University. She has won writing fellowships and awards from Inprint, University of Houston, and Texas State University, and has taught writing and literature at the college level for over eight years. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in North American Review, The Greensboro Review, and North Dakota Quarterly.

Obi Umeozor received a B.A. in English from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review, adda, Shift, and elsewhere. He has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is currently a PhD (Fiction) candidate at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.


The Gulf Coast Reading Series is grateful for the support of the following organizations: Lawndale Art Center; Humanities Texas; the Brown Foundation; Houston Endowment, Inc.; Inprint; the National Endowment for the Arts; Poets & Writers; the Texas Commission on the Arts; the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program and School of Art; the Gulf Coast Board of Trustees, including Board President Misty Matin and Vice President Laura Callaway; the Literary Arts Emergency Fund, cosponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the National Book Foundation, and CLMP.