Flash Reader

Jane Hirshfield

Poet, Essayist, and Translator
Jane Hirshfield gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. A poet, translator, essayist, and editor, she received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Hirshfield’s books of poetry include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Alfred A....

Rina Huang

2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate
Rina Huang gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Rina Huang is still a half-child, teetering on the brink of adulthood. She is co-editor of The Steele in which she also publishes frequently. A soon-to-be graduate of the College Preparatory School in Oakland, as well as a soon-to-be-freshman at Amherst College, she finds herself at the constant cruz of exploration, of newness. She is an alumnus of the...

Ra Malika Imhotep

Black Feminist Writer, Performance Artist, and PhD Candidate of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley
Ra Malika Imhotep gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Their academic and creative work tends the relationships between Black femininity, Southern vernacular aesthetics...

Mason J.

Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist
Mason J. gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Mason J. is an Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist, inspired by life as a born raised, and displaced Black and Indigenous San Francisco Local, Sick/Disabled Queer Two-Spirit, and Land Use advocate. Their photographs, poetry, dance, and social commentary have been published in many a zine, at various festivals, all around the internet, and in...

Fiza Jihan

Artist working in Videography, Writing, and Sound
Fiza Jihan gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Fiza Jihan is a filmmaker whose creative work is devotional in nature, spiritually inclined and currently a reflection on grief, familial ties, migration, and friendship. Their processes inform each other and are integrated; they work with prose, videography, and sound to move through personal emotional realities and catalyze new somatic experiences for...

Ava Koohbor

Poet, Visual, and Sound Artist
Ava Koohbor gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website. Ava Koohbor is a native Farsi-speaker poet and visual artist who now lives in San Francisco. Many of her poems have been appeared in various magazines. Her chapbook, Triangle Squared...

Dana Koster

Poet and Photographer
Dana Koster gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in October 2021, part of the Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Dana Koster was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Ventura, California. She earned her English degree from UC Berkeley and MFA in poetry from Cornell University. From 2011-2013, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two children, where she works as a...

Việt Lê

Artist, Writer, Chair of Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts
Việt Lê gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past twenty years examines spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return...

Raina J. León

Poet, Writer, and Former Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s College of California
Raina J. León gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of...

Muriel Leung

Author and Faculty in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts
Muriel Leung gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Muriel Leung is the author of the forthcoming novel-in-stories How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company) and several collections that include Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat...