Flash Reader

Andrea Abi-Karam

Poet-Performer Cyborg
Andrea Abi-Karam gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Andrea Abi-Karamis a trans, SWANA, punk poet-performer cyborg, workshop facilitator, and activist. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH(Commune Editions, 2016), queers Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Under the full Community Engagement Scholarship, Andrea received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. With Drea Marina...

Kim Addonizio

Writer, Music-Maker, and Maquisard
Kim Addonizio gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/...

Katherine Agyemaa Agard

Writer and Interdisciplinary Artist
Katherine Agyemaa Agard gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in Fall of 2021, part of the Flash Reading Series.

Katherine Agyemaa Agard is the eldest daughter of a zoologist and a botanist. At 18, she won, and declined, an Open National Scholarship in the Natural Sciences from the government of Trinidad & Tobago. Her interdisciplinary work is rooted in painting, performance, and writing. She holds an AB in Visual and Environmental Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard College and an MFA in Writing from UC-San...

Bahaar Ahsan

Writer, Artist, and Translator
Bahaar Ahsan gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Bahaar Ahsan is a writer, artist, and translator based in the Bay Area, with familial origins in the port city of Abadan in the south of Iran. Like any other tgirl, Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s) and aims to interrogate ontologies which separate the ideological from the somatic, the aural from the visual, rage from softness, homeland from host-land, past from present from future. Bahaar serves as a...

Ari Banias

Author
Ari Banias gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Ari Banias is the author of A Symmetry, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody, both from W. W. Norton. His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, and has been published in American Poetry Review, Triple Canopy, The Nation, Georgia Review, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, The Yale Review, and ...

Dodie Bellamy

Novelist, Poet, and Essayist
Dodie Bellamy gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist with an extensive body of work that includes many books and a handful of chapbooks. Her writing is known for its genre-bending approach, focusing on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts, and all things queer. She champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, and the troubled. Bellamy believes that the spiritual and the political can be discovered in the most unexpected places...

Kaylan Black

2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate
Kaylan Black gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Kaylan Black, 2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate and a member of the National Society of High School Scholars. At the time of her Flash Poetry reading in April 2023, she had been accepted into 3 colleges early as a 17 year-old and Senior at Oakland Charter High School. She has been on the African American Honor Roll and Achievement, Honor Roll, and a Junior Community Organizer with ACCE.

William Brewer

Novelist, Professor, Former Stegner Fellow
William Brewer gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

William Brewer’s debut novel, The Red Arrow, is out from Knopf. It received the Silver Medal for First Fiction from the California Book Awards. His first book, I Know Your Kind, was a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in A Public Space, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, and other journals. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he’s currently a Jones Lecturer...

MK Chavez

Writer, Educator
MK Chavez gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in May 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

MK Chavez is the award-winning author of Mothermorphosis, Dear Animal, Virgin Eyes, and a Brief History Of The Selfie

Chavez has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, CantoMundo, Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, Caldera

VONA, North Street Collective Residence Program, Real Time & Space Elevate Residency, and Napa Valley Writers Workshop.

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Jennifer S. Cheng

Poet
Jennifer S. Cheng gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Jennifer S. Cheng received her BA from Brown University, MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, and MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of: MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018”; House A (2016), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn...