The Arts Research Center (ARC) celebrates our Fall 2023 ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellows with a reading of work created during their fellowship semester. Please join us in welcoming thirteen extraordinary poets to ARC’s virtual stage:
Cody Achin (community fellow, Arizona)
Julian Ankney (community fellow, luk’upsíimey)
Al-An deSouza (faculty fellow, Berkeley)
Ayling Dominguez (graduate fellow, Arizona)
Ines Hernandez-Avila (community fellow, luk’upsíimey)
Chris Hoshnic (undergraduate fellow, Arizona)
Fede Kong-Gonzalez (undergraduate fellow, Berkeley)
Marisa Lin (graduate fellow, Berkeley)Cristina S. Mendez (graduate fellow, Berkeley)
Angel Sobotta (community fellow, luk’upsíimey)
Aimee Suzara (community fellow, Berkeley)
Taté Walker (community fellow, Arizona)
Sa Whitley (faculty fellow, Arizona)
They will be joined by ARC’s fall 2023 facilitators, poet and ASU Professor Natalie Diaz (Mojave) and ARC Director Beth Piatote (Nez Perce).
Under the theme of Reclamation, the fall 2023 Poetry Fellows were led by Indigenous writers who draw on Indigenous languages and aesthetics. UC Berkeley’s poetry fellows were joined by writers from Arizona State University and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (Diaz) and the community-based Nez Perce writing collective, luk’upsíimey (Piatote). The expansion of the Poetry for the Senses model in 2023 created connections around Indigenous issues across multiple western states and explored poetry and the politics of language in a wider framework. The interest was in creating a trans-Indigenous conversation, with juxtapositions that decenter European thought and begin to translate an oceanic-to-river-to-forest poetic imaginary.
UC Berkeley occupies the unceded territory of the Ohlone peoples, and as a land grant university it benefits materially from the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. In fall 2023, ARC created dialogues with Arizona State University, another public land-grant university that also has significant, complex histories with Native territorial dispossession as well as with Indigenous education and outreach. In addition, they collaborated with fellows from the Nez Perce writing group luk’upsíimey, which uses poetry to assist in crucial reclamation and linguistic revitalization. The Nez Perce were exiled and forced to disperse from their homelands in Wallawa, Oregon; language and poetry is one mechanism of their return.
This event is part of the Arts Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses program, which explores the relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness, and resistance. The reading is sponsored by the Arts Research Center in partnership with Engaging the Senses Foundation. As a think tank for the arts at UC Berkeley, ARC acts as a facilitator and connector between campus and the many flourishing regional poetry communities.