Poetry and the Senses Fellows

Patricia Smith

ARC Fellow, Poet, Spoken-Word Performer, Playwright, Author, Writing Teacher, and Former Journalist.

Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, includingUnshuttered (Feb 2023);Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the2018 Pulitzer...

Angel Sobotta

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Angel Sobotta is an enrolled member of the Nez Perce Tribe. She has worked for the Nez Perce Language since 1998, serving as a coordinator and teaching language at Lapwai schools, the mamayá’snim hitéemenwees – Children’s Learning place, Kamiah and Clearwater Valley schools, Northwest Indian College, Lewis-Clark State College, the University of Idaho, and Washington State University. Sobotta’s research is Titwáatit, Nimipuutímt, Wéetes: Ceptemelíxnikt Nimipuuwíitki kaa Cukwenéewit – The Stories, Niimíipuu Language, Land: Investigating the Nez Perce People’s Way of...

Aimee Suzara

ARC Fellow, Writer, Performer, and Educator

Oakland-Based Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. As a playwright, her new work THE REAL SAPPHO was commissioned by Cutting Ball Theater and awarded by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works fund and National Endowment for the Arts, and TINY FIRES will have its World Premiere in 2023. Her poetry book SOUVENIR (2014) was a Willa Award Finalist, and her poems appear in ...

Tierra Sydnor

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Tierra Sydnor (she/her) is currently earning her bachelors in French, English, and German. Her work focuses on how her experience as an African American woman and how that has affected her spiritual and life journey. The daughter of two army veterans, she spent most of her childhood in Fishers, Indiana. She has a strong passion for religious tolerance and cross-community cooperation. Tierra in her free time hoards books and watches Golden Girls.

Tierra was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with University of...

Jennif(f)er Tamayo

ARC Fellow, Poet, Essayist, and Performer

Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer. Her poetry collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), YOU DA ONE (Noemi 2017) and her latest publication, TO KILL THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT (Green Lantern Press, 2018). Currently, JT lives and works on Ohlone and Patwin lands and is pursuing her PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Her research explores how contemporary Black and Indigenous poets use vocal practices to counternarrate histories of colonial violence....

D’mani Thomas

ARC Fellow, Visual Theorist, and Writer

D’mani Thomas is a Black visual theorist, horror enthusiast, and writer from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). D’mani has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Foglifter literary journal, and Bakanal de Afrique via Afro Urban Society. When he’s not writing, find him watching horror movie trailers, drinking smoothies, or reading YouTube spoilers for movies he has no attention span for. D’mani’s work has been published by The Auburn Avenue, The Ana, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Shade Literary Arts, and his poem, “Survival Tactics” was recently shortlisted for...

Kellen Trenal

ARC Fellow, Visual Artist, Performer, and Small Business Owner

Kellen Trenal (pronounced like “Chanel”) is a visual artist, performer, small business owner, alumnus of the University of Notre Dame, and holistic wellness enthusiast, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Proudly representing both African (Black American) and niimíipuu (Nez Perce) ancestry, Kellen embraces these multiple identities to empower their work in all its manifestations. Kellen shares (he)artwork through Trenal Original, a traditional-arts based, 2SLGBTQ+/BIPOC-owned, small business. Kellen utilizes a wealth of Indigenous knowledge to...

Taté Walker

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Taté Walker (they/them) is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller. Their first full-length poetry book, “The Trickster Riots,” was published in 2022, by Abalone Mountain Press. Taté, a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, has written, photographed, and/or edited for various outlets, including The Nation, Yellow Medicine Review, Pipe Wrench, Apartment Therapy, Everyday Feminism, Native Peoples, Indian Country Today, Subaru Drive, December, and ANMLY. Taté has 20 years of experience in print/digital...

Noah Warren

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Noah Warren is the author of The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon, 2021) and The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale, 2016). His honors include the Yale Series of Younger Poets and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and his poems appear in The Paris Review, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. At Berkeley, his research traces the pervasive influence of natural history and its classificatory logic in nineteenth century America, investigating how these structure practices of observation, encourage anti-progressivism, and subtend the...

Sa Whitley

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Sa Whitley (they/them/theirs) is a black queer poet and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Transformation at Arizona State University. They received their Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Whitley has received poetry fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference (‘22), Cave Canem, and the Community of Writers. They have published poems in POETRY Magazine and scholarship in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ). Whitley’s academic scholarship examines housing...