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 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.