April 2022 Reading
April bugs and allergies are bothering most of us right now, but our lovely readers won't bother anyone! Here are our readers for this Thursday's reading.
Jenny Li-Wang is a writer and medical assistant living in Houston, Texas. Her writing has been awarded the 2021 Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing at Rice University, the 2020 Creative Nonfiction Prize from R2: The Rice Review, and the 2020 Max Apple Prize in Nonfiction Writing from Fondren Library.
Pritha Bhattacharyya is a fiction PhD candidate and Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow at the University of Houston. She received her MFA from Boston University and has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She received the 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for Glimmer Train‘s 2019 Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Bodega, and elsewhere.
Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His poetry books are the forthcoming These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit (Milkweed Editions 2022), Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon Univ Press 2016), The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon Univ Press 2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose Press 2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the John Clare Prize, and the Arab American Book Award.
February 2022 Reading
Spend the end of February sharing drinks and claps and loving our readers on the Poison Girl Patio. This month's debonair line-up features Patrick Stockwell, Raie Crawford, and Bruno Ríos.
Patrick Stockwell is an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow and PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Houston. He holds an MFA from New Mexico State University and is the author of The Light Here Changes Everything, winner of the 2018 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.
Raie Crawford is a Wiley College Alumna from Houston, Texas. As the 2017-2018 Houston VIP Slam Champion and Houston Performance Poet of the Year, Raie is ranked within the top 20 among the Women of the World Poetry Slam (2014-2015/2017-2018) and top 25 within the rankings of the Individual World Poetry Slam (2017-2018). Raie has performed as a poet within every corner of houston, as a guest speaker at several HBCUs around the country, and as the keynote speaker at the Women of Solidarity Conference in New York. She considers herself both an “artivist” and “trap music connoisseur”, ready to perform at a city near you.
Bruno Ríos is a translator, multigenre writer, and educator from Sonora, México. He holds a PhD in Latin American literature from the University of Houston and teaches Spanish and Latin American Lit at The Emery/Weiner School. He is the author of three poetry books, most recently the revised second edition of Cueva de leones/Lion’s Den (2021), partially translated into English by Roberto Tejada, and a novel, La voz de las abejas (Sediento Ediciones, 2016). He is the founder and director of Books & Bikes: A Book Club on Two Wheels, organizing and leading rides through the city as well as promoting community building through literature and cycling.
December 2021 Reading
No better way to end the year than to gather around, drink, and listen to amazing writers on the patio. We’ve got a fantastic line-up for our December 2nd reading. You don’t wanna miss this one!
Brenda Peynado
Brenda Peynado is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UH. Her first book, The Rock Eaters, is a short story collection featuring angels, ghosts, aliens, and Latina girlhood, focusing on what it means to love across boundaries of class, race, gender, and immigration. Her short stories have been featured in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize anthologies. After returning from a Fulbright grant to do research in the Dominican Republic, she is working on a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who tries to save her combatant mother. Her fiction and screenwriting focus on political violence, girlhood, and the moral quandaries of love, while her craft and scholarship focuses on magical realism and alternative realities.
Her work: https://gulfcoastmag.org/online/winter/spring-2020/2-stories-20/
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Sweet Geometry (Bloomsday Press, 2022) and Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), which was named a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for 2020 Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters.
Her work has appeared in AGNI, Missouri Review, Iowa Review, [PANK], Verse Daily, Pleiades, Zocalo Public Square, and others, as well as the anthologies Xicanx: 21 Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century (University of Arizona, 2022), and Houston Noir (Akashic Books, 2019).
She has collaborated or been commissioned for poetic projects with the City of Houston, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University. Her poet laureate community work includes writing a workshop resource book on mindfulness and writing, and overseeing a public exhibit from COVID communal poems she curated from Houstonian's submitted poems.
She is currently a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College's MFA low-residency program in creative writing.
Her work: https://catapult.co/stories/bodies-when-a-mystery-illness-strikes
Lisa Wartenberg (she/her) is a Colombian-born writer of fiction. She is an MFA candidate in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, where she is an Inprint Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellow. Her work is forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal and received the 2021 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. She serves as Assistant Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.
October 2021 Reading
We're back! Following our pandemic-induced hiatus (we swear it was never about you!), we're happy to announce the Poison Pen relaunch reading featuring Tomás Q. Morín, Miah Arnold, and Nick Almeida! Same time (8:30 pm), same place (Poison Girl patio). We hope to see many of our old friends and look forward to meeting new ones.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collection Machete and the forthcoming memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He is co-editor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University.
Miah Arnold wrote the novel Sweet Land of Bigamy, the 2014 Best American Essay selection “You Owe Me,” and she is finishing up a book of poetry. She curated the quotes for Figurative Poetics, the banners with stories hanging throughout downtown Houston for CORE Design Studio and the Houston Downtown Management District. She is the founder and principal of Grackle and Grackle Writing Workshops, where she makes it possible for anybody who wants to take a writing class to take one with the best teaching writers from Houston and around the country.
Nick Almeida’s stories and essays have appeared in Pleiades, The Southeast Review, Mid-American Review, American Literary Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston and holds an MFA from The Michener Center for Writers where he edited Bat City Review. His chapbook, Masterplans, was selected by judge Steve Almond as grand prize winner of The Masters Review’s inaugural Chapbook Contest in Fiction and will be available soon.