The Loft Hour: Tehmina Khan + Fae Myenne Ng

Tehmina Khan is a daughter of Indian immigrant scientists who has spent her adult life writing, teaching, resisting, and mothering. She has taught science to preschoolers, citizenship to octogenarians, and poetry translation to elementary school students; she currently teaches College Writing at UC Berkeley and Poetry for the People at City College of San Francisco, where she defends everyone's right to a quality education.  Her work has been published in Poets11, Written Here,OccuPoetry, CCSF Forum Magazine, Civil Liberties United, The City is Already Speaking, Essential Truths, and Muslim American Writers at Home. She lives, writes, rides her bicycle, and loves on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land, commonly known as San Francisco.

Fae Myenne Ng’s work has received support from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Rome Prize, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the NEA, the Lannan Foundation, and The Radcliffe Institute. Her latest work, Orphan Bachelors, has received the William Saroyan International Award for Writing in Nonfiction, the Gold Medal for Nonfiction at the California Book Awards, and the Best Book Award for Nonfiction from the Chinese American Librarians Association. She had held residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her first novel, Bone, was a finalist for the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award. The second, Steer Toward Rock, was awarded a 2008 American Book Award. In 2009, she was a Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book, Orphan Bachelors, is the winner of the 2024 California Book Awards Gold Medal for Nonfiction, 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Nonfiction, and the 2024 American Book Award. She is a Continuing Lecturer in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley’s department of Ethnic Studies.

Natalia Brizuela is a Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Império. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th Century photography in Brasil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (Rocco, 2014) is a study of contemporary literature in an expanded field, looking particularly at the relationship between current literary practices and photographic languages, techniques and materialities. With Jodi Roberts she has written two books, Photography at its Limits (OneEditionBooks, 2019) and The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford University Press, 2018), as part of exhibition projects they co-curated. She has also curated NO SÉ (El templo del sol), a solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires in 2015, and is currently preparing an exhibition on the work of Waldemar Cordeiro with Rachel Price. Natalia was the Arts Research Center's interim Director for the 2018/2019 school year.