The 2022-23 season of Poetry and Prose kicks off October 12, featuring new graduate students in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. The long-running reading series, highlighting the work of UH faculty, students, alumni and other well-known writers, takes place in the MD Anderson Library Honors College Commons at 6 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

October 12 Reader Bios

Layla Al-Bedawi is a writer of fiction, prose poetry, lyric essays, and hybrid strangelings. English is her third language, but she’s been dreaming in it for years. Born in Germany to Kurdish and Ukrainian parents, she moved to the US in her twenties. Here in Houston, she has loved building and supporting writing communities by working with several literary organizations, including one she co-founded. Her work has been selected for the 2021 Best Small Fictions anthology; has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, IGNYTE Award, and Rhysling Award; and is published in Wigleaf, Bayou Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Juked, and elsewhere.

Charlotte Bellomy is a fiction writer from the Carolinas.

Brittany Bronson is a first-year Ph.D student in fiction who came to Houston from Las Vegas. Her essays have appeared in the Guardian, the Times of London, Bitch, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times, where she was a contributing opinion writer from 2015-2020. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, Paper Darts, ZYZZYVA, and others. She has Received awards and recognition from the Nevada Arts Council, TalkPoverty.org, and Vegas Seven magazine, and earned her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2014.

Katerina Ivanov Prado is a Mexican-Russian writer whose work has been published in Brevity, Passages North, The Rumpus, The Florida Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Pinch, Joyland and others. She has won the John Weston Award for Fiction, the 2019 AWP Intro Journals Award, The Pinch Nonfiction Literary Award, and the Florida Review’s Editor’s Award. She is a recipient of a 2022 Reese’s Book Club LitUp fellowship. She received her MFA from University of Arizona and is a prose editor for The Adroit Journal.

Kelan Nee is a first year PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Originally from Arlington, MA, he has worked as a boat builder and carpenter. His poems have been published in Poetry, the Yale Review, the Missouri Review and elsewhere.

Bevin O’Connor grew up in Southern California and received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California. A 2022 finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology, her work can be found in Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.

Adrian Pachuca is a native Houstonian with a stereotypical passion for Whataburger and hate for I-45 traffic. He is a clumsy person who identifies as a love poet since he’s a little obsessed with understanding what we really mean when we say “I love you.”

Aishwarya Sahi is a writer and editor from Patna, India. She holds a master’s degree in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta and is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at UHCWP. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, LA Review of Books, and The Recluse, among others. 

Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokiksas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX) as an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor fellow at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing and Literature PhD program and is the author of Particles of a Stranger Light forthcoming from Veliz Books in 2023. An alum of the currently under threat MFA program in Creative Writing at Purdue University and the BA program in creative writing at the University of Houston, Anthony’s poems have appeared in guesthouse, Gulf Coast, Grist, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Oversound, Quarter After Eight, Southern Indiana Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere.

Mathew Weitman is a first year PhD candidate at the University of Houston and an assistant poetry editor at Gulf Coast. His work can be found in the Georgia Review, where he was the winner of the 2021 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the Missouri Review, New South, the Evergreen Review, the Southwest Review, and is forthcoming in Bennington Review. He received his MFA from the New School, and was a 2022 creative resident at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, WA.

marshall woodward is a writer born & raised on the gulf coast. he lives in houston where he is an mfa candidate at the university of houston’s creative writing program. his work has appeared in FENCE, gossamer, b l u s h, pompom press and wrongdoing mag. he was previously editor in chief of the satire project cultural fan fiction. he is currently writing a manuscript about empire, iphone addiction, and the met cloisters.