ARC Fellows

Nathalie Khankan

2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Nathalie Khankan is the author of quiet orient riot (Fall 2020), winner of Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin. Her work appears in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, The Volta, and Crab Creek Review. Straddling Danish, Finnish, Syrian and Palestinian homes and heirlooms, Nathalie currently lives in San Francisco. She teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley.

Natalie was an ARC Fellow in Spring & Fall 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen...

Fede Kong-Gonzalez

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge from a project having pulled out something they could never quite grab at before. Fede loves love, being undone, and a good string. For the new year they plan to do a bird watching Big Year, learn balance, and be in conversation.

Fede was an...

Anastasia Le

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Anastasia Le is a poet and printmaker from the Lake Chabot area of the East Bay. Her work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review’s Midterm Five: Interlace/Intersect, the 2021 Southeast Asian Student Coalition anthology, and on the walls of her former co-op. She approaches poetry with a Vietnamese linguistic sensibility, but writes in English—she’s working on that. You can find her behind the counter at Eastwind Books of Berkeley planning their next open mic.

Anastasia was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the...

Anneka Lenssen

2019 ARC Fellow

Anneka Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, and Third World humanism.

She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with colleagues Nada...

Marisa Lin

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Marisa Lin is a daughter of Chinese immigrants and Minnesota native. Her first training in poetry was through western classical music. A 2023 Roots Wounds Words Poetry Fellow, Marisa is an alum of the VONA, Kenyon Review, and Community of Writers workshops. You can find her work at Poetry South, Porter House Review, The Racket, and elsewhere. She is pursuing a Master’s Degree of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and in her free time enjoys hiking, petting cats, and writing random letters to friends.

Marisa was an ARC Fellow in...

Gisselle Medina

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Gisselle Medina’s identity consists of multitudes—a Latine, queer, non-binary from Los Angeles. They are a poet, visual artist and journalist in their final year as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. In Medina’s scholarship, they investigate the history of literature and intertwine various methods and theories into literary and cultural analysis. In their poetry, Medina writes fiercely about their restless past and our collective world, in hopes to inspire and transcend anyone willing to listen. Medina inspires to be an investigative reporter for...

Cristina S. Méndez

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Cristina Méndez (she/her/ella) is a Chicana writer and educator born and raised in the Bay Area (Muwekma Ohlone territory). Through her ongoing work alongside Maya Mam activists on projects of language revitalization, she explores the continuum of how people understand and support each other across lines of difference. Cristina is interested in coalitions, tensions, transformational learning, and healing as she envisions other futurities in the present.

Cristina was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the...

Tzintia Montano-Ramirez

2023/24 ARC Fellow - Indigenous Poetics Lab

Tzintia Montano-Ramirez (she / her) is Ña’à Davi Chilanga very interested in cultural identities. Her interests focus on language revitalization and reclamation, fieldwork and language documentation of the Mixtec from Southern Puebla, Mexico. She likes the geographical compound words of OaxaCalifornia and PueblaYork, since they condense very complex meanings and experiences. However, she does not only like these terms, but she has also worked with these diaspora communities at different levels. She’s currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California...

Rusty Morrison

2020 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Rusty Morrison is the author of Risk, which will be published by Black Ocean in Spring 2024. Her other books include After Urgency (which won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize) and the true keeps calm biding its story (which won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, James Laughlin Award, N.California Book Award, & DiCastagnola Award). Her poems have been recently published in APR, Fence, and other journals. She is the co-publisher of Omnidawn. She teaches and gives writing consultations.

Rusty was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2020 with the...

Sara Mumolo

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Sara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter and Mortar, both published by Omnidawn. She serves as the Associate Director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA. Writing has appeared in Lana Turner, ...