Gulf Coast Reading Series: November 20, 2020, 7pm
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where they teach and direct the UMass Boston MFA in Creative Writing Program. They also direct The Chautauqua Writers’ Festival. They are the author of the poetry collections Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series. Travesty Generator received the 2020 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize for interdisciplinary and venturesome work. They are also the author of Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. Bertram’s other publications include the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books, 2012), winner of the Phantom Books chapbook award; and the artist book Grand Dessein (commissioned by Container Press), a mixed media artifact that meditates on the work and writing of the artist Paul Klee.
giovanni singleton is the author of Ascension, informed by the life and work of Alice Coltrane, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal and AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper, a collection of visual art and poetry. Her writing has been widely anthologized as well as exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2018, she received the African American Literature and Culture Society’s Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. For ten years she coordinated the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California, Berkeley where she also served as the Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics. singleton was recently awarded an inaugural 2020 c3:Initiative letterpress residency and her dreamography is forthcoming from Noemi Press.
Devereux Fortuna is a writer and visual artist, currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston. Devereux's work can be found at Waxwing Magazine, Triangle House Review, and elsewhere.
Sonia Hamer is a writer from Houston, TX. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, Online Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast, and a Program Associate for Writers in the Schools. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction's True Story, Allegory Ridge's Archipelago, The Dollhouse, and elsewhere.
This online event is produced in partnership with Lawndale Art Center and will be live-streamed through Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and YouTube Live.
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For those unable to watch live on Friday, recordings will be made available after the event.