This month’s Gulf Coast reading will feature WITS writers Janine Joseph and Liz Countryman. The reading will be held tonight at 7:00 PM at Brazos Bookstore.

Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph is a Ph.D. student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where she is also a senior reader for Gulf Coast. She holds degrees from UC Riverside and the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she taught with the Starworks Foundation and Community Word Project. She is a recipient of a 2009 Paul & Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship for New Americans. Her work has most recently appeared in Third Coast, Spoon River Poetry Review, Nimrod, and in the chapbook Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets.

Liz Countryman earned her B.A. from Tufts University and her M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. She has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, from whom she received the Brown Foundation Award in 2008.  She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Houston, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast.  Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Makeout Creek, Forklift, Ohio, and ink node.