Poetry and the Senses Fellows

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...

D. Kealiʻi MacKenzie

Poet
D. Kealiʻi MacKenzie was a Poetry & the Senses Fellow in 2023.

D. Kealiʻi MacKenzie is a queer, Native Hawaiian poet. He is the author of The Mana of Salt (Backbone Press, 2023), winner of the 2023 Backbone Press Chapbook Contest, and From Hunger to Prayer (Silverneedle Press, 2018). He lives in Kailua, on the island of Oahu in Hawai‘i.

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 S. Méndez was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative - she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Cristina S. 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,...

Hieu Minh Nguyen

Poetry and the Senses Fellow, Poet, and Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University
Hieu Minh Nguyen gave a Visiting Writer Reading/Talk at the Arts Research Center on February 23, 2021.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet from the Twin Cities, he is the author of two collections of poetry,This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. Some awards and honors Hieu has received include: the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy...

Aja Monet

ARC Fellow, Poet, Writer, Lyricist, and Activist
Aja Monet was a Poetry & the Senses Fellow in Spring 2021.

Born in New York City to parents of Cuban and Jamaican descent and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, Aja Monet Bacquie began writing poems when she was eight or nine years old. While attending Baruch College Campus High School, she performed spoken-word for school talent shows. Around this time, Monet joined Urban Word NYC—a non-profit organization that offers guidance and public platforms to young writers, particularly those of color—and became a part of a community of aspiring urban...

Rusty Morrison

2020 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Rusty Morrison was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

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...

Sara Mumolo

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Sara Mumolo was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2021 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

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 ...

Ramona Naddaff

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Ramona Naddaff is the author of a collection of prose-poems, Paris/Paris (Tête d’Affiche, 1991) and of a permanent installation of a poem-collage, “Ancient Greece and Democracy” in the Lisbon metro station. She has written a scholarly monograph, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic (University of Chicago, 2002) as well as essays on ancient Greek philosophy and literature, and on literary censorship. She is currently completing a manuscript on the writing practices of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, Never Alone: The Making...

Jesse Nathan

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Jesse Nathan’s poems appear in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, FENCE, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. His translations of Alfonsina Storni and Brenda Solís-Fong in Mantis and Poetry International. Nathan was born in Berkeley, where he lived until he was ten; he spent the second half of his childhood on a wheat farm in rural Kansas. Nathan moved to San Francisco after college, in part to take a position at McSweeney’s. His work has been supported by the...