Tulsa LitFest Opening Night Reading

Join us for opening remarks to LitFest and readings by Alex Temblador, Christopher Stewart, and Joshua Gottlieb Miller!

Alex Temblador received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma in 2014 and became an author in 2018 with the publication of by Arte Publico Press. was published by Blackstone Publishing in 2022, while was published by St. Martin’s Essentials in 2024. Her creative writing has appeared in anthologies like and , as well as literary journals like Colorado Review, PALABRITAS, D Magazine, Cigale Literary Magazine, and Scissortale Review.

Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have recently appeared or will appear in RHINO, Bellevue Literary Review, Oberon, Bryant Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He received the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize and was a 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award, among other recognitions.

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller received his PhD and MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he also served as a Poetry Editor and Digital Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. Joshua has published poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing. His writing has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Tent Writing Conference at the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere, and from 2018-2019 he served as an inaugural Post-Harvey Think Tank Fellow at Rice University's Humanities Research Center, representing folklore. His writing has won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Inprint Barthelme Prize in Poetry, and the Inprint Robert J. Sussman Prize. His debut collection, “The Art of Bagging,” won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. His second book, Dybbuk Americana, is available now from Wesleyan University Press. Joshua teaches at San Jacinto College, and lives in Houston with his wife and son. 

Host or Publisher Tulsa LitFest