Reading Series March 2024

7 PM CDT - Gulf Coast Reading Series event featuring  Allegra Hyde and UHCWP students Madeleine Gaudin, El Williams, Pritha Bhattacharyya,

Join us for this installment of the the 2023–2024 Gulf Coast Reading Series at Lawndale Art Center!

Please join us on March 22nd at 7pm (doors open at 6:30). 

Please note:
Masks will be required while indoors at this event. N95 and KN95 masks are strongly encouraged. Social distancing is encouraged.

Allegra Hyde is the author of the story collection THE LAST CATASTROPHE, an Editors’ Choice selection for The New York Times. Her debut novel ELEUTHERIA was named a "Best Book of 2022" by The New Yorker, shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, and featured on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Her first story collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Hyde has received four Pushcart Prizes. Her work has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her fiction, nonfiction, and humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, BOMB, and other venues. Hyde has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Artist Residency, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Lucas Artist Residency Program, the Jentel Foundation, The Studios at Key West, VCCA, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.

Madeleine Gaudin is a writer, editor and educator originally from Austin, Texas. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Houston and an Inprint Brown Fellow. She is currently the Program Associate at Writers in the Schools and a Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast. 

El Williams III is a poet born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. A 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize finalist for The Georgia Review, his work has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Orion Magazine, New England Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, Community of Writers, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and the Watering Hole. He earned a dual MA/MFA from Indiana University and is currently a doctoral student studying literature and creative writing at the University of Houston.

Pritha Bhattacharyya is a Bengali American writer. She is a fiction PhD candidate and Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston and received her MFA from Boston University. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, VCCA, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Napa Valley Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Inprint Houston, Tagore Society of Houston, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She is the recipient of the 2024 Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, the 2023 Inprint Joan and Stanford Alexander Prize in Fiction, and the 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. Her work appears in The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere.