2015 In another life, I had Houston. I was wearing the wrong shoes trying to walk quietly through The Menil Collection, where you aren’t allowed to get married—something I didn’t know—with whoever I loved at the time.   I stare at the paintings to avoid staring…

$138,000 into the story, there is nowhere else to go. I spent my twenty-seventh year typing letters of application, the nerves in each hand wrecked by this seemingly endless work, my persistence motivated only by the fear of becoming homeless. Three…

156,000 into the story, the room is empty.   The man I have started dating listens to my stories of how the dinners at the American Academy would unfold, the careful arrangement of the linens and the cutlery, how each fellow was applauded on the Monday…

Co-Written with Lisa Olstein   When considering the resurgence of dense, gratifyingly difficult experimental writing in recent years, the specter of Gertrude Stein (especially Tender Buttons) looms large.  In a book-length study, Conflicting Stories,…

Co-Written with Karla Kelsey Grubby violet dusk.  Everywhere, the tongue-tang of rust…. In a recent collection, Night Vision, Claire Wahmanholm presents us with a speaker who drifts between rhetorical modes, trying each of them on as though they were…

Co-Written with Chris Campanioni   Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and mainstreamed, Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining “a culture where discourse would circulate…

About the Participants Mary Biddinger is the author of six full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Enterprise and The Czar (with Jay Robinson), both from Black Lawrence Press. Her work has recently appeared in numerous journals including…

In her recent article, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky argues that for many women, “surveillance, and the self-surveillance prompted by constant observation, is covertly coded as a masculine gaze,”…

As a student, I was obedient. I rarely questioned anyone who spoke with the least bit of authority.  Yet the whole time, I remember an unease blossoming beneath my skin.  Its petals unfurling one by one as the pages of my manuscript were turned by my…

This week, Gulf Coast is headed to the land of the stars--literary stars, that is! Wednesday, March 30th through Saturday, April 2nd, Gulf Coast will be representing at #AWP16, from our handsome booth at the bookfair