Voices as Diverse as the Gulf itself.

Founded by Phillip Lopate and Donald Barthelme in 1986, Gulf Coast is a journal of literature, art, and critical art writing, publishing contributors who represent a flow of international cultures, voices, and aesthetics. Through programs and publications, and in collaboration with the University of Houston, Gulf Coast brings consequential art and writing to an engaged audience.

Learn more: see our masthead and executive board information here.

Features

Translation of Najat Abed Alsamad: Winner of the 2021 Translation Prize in Fiction

Najat Abed Alsamad (transl. by) Anam Zafar

As she dreams, she knits birds onto blankets, sheltering them from the misery of the outside world in the new homes she fashions from her palms. Other times, she knits cushion covers, continuing till an hour of night only inhabited by other lonely, dreaming women.

Burn the First Reel: An Interview with Fernando A. Flores

“You know when you watch a movie and there's a crumbling bridge and somebody's running, trying to make it to the other side?” Flores told me, describing the mad dash of writing that allowed him to slow down when he got to Valleyesque. “And when a character makes it to the other side, they are like, I can't believe it, the bridge is gone. Yeah, I feel that way all the time, that I made it past the crumbling bridge, miraculously.”

From the GC Blog

Losing the Plot: On Lauren Berlant's Desire/Love

Christina McCausland

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who you ‘are’ only by interpreting…

Feeling Political

Anthony Sutton

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully exist in public, or…

Berlant’s Phraseology: An Impression

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

Lauren Berlant was ripe for imitation. Some young scholars imitated them in their writing in the hopes of being taken more seriously, disgruntled students imitated them as a way of…