Update 9/17/19: Due to the tropical storm and weather forecast for tomorrow, Poetry & Prose has been rescheduled for October 16.

The 2019-2020 season of Poetry and Prose kicks off October 16, 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 Honors College Commons, MD Anderson Library at 5:30 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

Readers for October 16:

Erik Brown (MFA Poetry) received a BA in English and Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Erik comes to Houston from a seven-year career in fundraising and has helped raise millions of dollars for research into psychedelic-assisted therapies.

Christopher Miguel Flakus (MFA Poetry) has published work in The Huffington Post, Akashic Books: Mondays are Murder Noir Series, Indietronica, Outlaw Poetry, Glass Mountain Magazine, In Recovery Magazine, Glass Poetry, Black Heart Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2017 he was awarded the Fabian Worsham Prize for fiction. He is the author of the chapbooks Bear Down Into Hell With Me (As Only a True Friend Would), and Thirst, and Other  Poems  through Iron Lung Press, as well as the chapbooks Christiana, and Dialogos: Mexico City Poems from Analog Submission Press. He is the co-editor of Defunkt Magazine, a literary magazine focused on outsider writing and art. Christopher grew up in Mexico City and writes in both English and Spanish.

Joshua Steven Gregory (MFA Poetry) was born in Philadelphia, PA and is from southern New Jersey and Vermont. He has been awarded scholarships from the Colgate Writers’ Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA for his work. He is also a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School where he studied religion and ethics and practiced healthcare chaplaincy. He currently serves as Editor-at-Large for Peripheries Journal based out of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard. Most recently, his poems have appeared in the Colorado Review and Denver Quarterly.

Gabriella Adriana Iacono (MFA Poetry) grew up in Staten Island, New York, where she earned her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the College of Staten Island CUNY. She has worked in public education since 2014, and has served as an editor for NYSAI Press. Iacono is currently working on her first collection of poems.

Dan Kennedy (PhD Fiction) holds an MFA from Virginia Tech, where he won the Emily Morrison Prize in fiction. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania and graduated from Boston University with a BA in English; he was also a member of BU’s Division 1 wrestling team. His stories have appeared in BULL, Ghost Parachute, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. He’s currently at work on his first novel.

Aris Kian (MFA Poetry) is an inaugural member of CoogSlam, the 4th in the nation collegiate slam team. She has work published in Underground Journal. She was a blogger for AfroVibes Media and co-hosted poetry workshops for Writers in the Schools. She has been a featured reader for Write About Now Poetry (w/ CoogSlam), The Vibe Experience, and Glass Mountain.

Katie Milligan (MFA Fiction) grew up in Maine and earned her BA in English and Psychology from Dartmouth College. She has recently lived in Boston and New Hampshire, where she worked by day on the health innovation team at an HR consultancy and by night/weekend as a fiction student at GrubStreet, a Boston writing center.

Kaitlin Rizzo (MFA Poetry) prefers her cities underwater. After being raised in the hurricane lands of Florida, she now lives in Houston where she is a first year MFA in poetry. Three years after writing her first poem about the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, she is still happily obsessed and is now at work on her first collection of poetry about Gentileschi’s life.

giovanni singleton (PhD Poetry) holds an MFA from the New College of California and is the author of Ascension (Counterpath Press, 2011), which won the California Book Award Gold Medal, and of the poetry/art collection AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper (Canarium Books, 2018). She received the African American Literature and Culture Society’s 2018 Stephen E. Henderson Award for literary achievement and served as the 2017-18 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Best American Experimental Writing, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and elsewhere. Her writing has also been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces.

Daniel Tompkins (MFA Poetry) is a poet and writer originally from Virginia. His work has appeared in Rattle, Chaleur, Twyckenham Notes, and The Visible Poetry Project, and his first Chapbook, You Are No Phoenix, You Are Merely Aflame, is set to be published by Finishing Line Press.