Featuring students from Martha Serpas’s Ecopoetics on the Gulf course

Josie Mitchell is in her third year of her MFA in fiction at the University of Houston. She is a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast and student advisor to the UH undergraduate literary magazine, Glass Mountain. She is from San Diego, California, and is at work on an apocalyptic story collection set there. It's called, Fuck You, El Niño.

Michelle Orsi grew up in Spokane, Washington, and currently serves as an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. She is an MFA student at the University of Houston.

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s poems can be found in concis, Grist, Four Way Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review and elsewhere, and a non-fiction/poetry hybrid is online at Pacifica Lit Review. He is the digital nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast and a PhD student here at UH.

Sam Thilén is an MFA candidate at University of Houston and an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. She studied English and Spanish at the University of Florida, where she served as editor-in-chief for the undergraduate literary magazine Tea. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tea, The Fine Print, Prairie, and The Boston Review. Sam loves Finland, word origins, and petting other people’s dogs.

Lani Yu is a first-generation Chinese-American poet. A third-year poetry MFA student at UH, she also serves as an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast and teaches English. She grew up in Orlando and graduated from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Psychology. She was a semifinalist for the 2016 DISQUIET Literary Prize Contest, and her work has appeared in University of Florida's TEA literary magazine. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript that explores complex family dynamics, cultural identity, and the lyric self.

Chelsea B. DesAutels who serves as poetry editor of Gulf Coast. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, The Texas Review, and others. She is the recipient of the Virginia Reiser Memorial Scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Houston, where she is an MFA candidate.

Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal lives as a rhyming-slogan creative activist. She is a Generation 1.5 poet (mexicana and Chicana), a translator, a sonic-improv collaborator, and an instructor of English. She is a Ph.D. student in the Creative Writing Program at UH. Her poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review and the Texas Review. She is the translator of Enigmas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Señal: a project of Libros Antena Books, BOMB, and Ugly Duckling Press, 2015), and Photograms of My Conceptual Heart, Absolutely Blind, by Minerva Reynosa (Cardboard House Press, 2016).