Visiting Writer

Aruna D'Souza

Editor, Writer, Curator
Aruna D'Souza gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 21, 2018.

Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and she is a contributor to The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, Art in America, ...

Natalie Diaz

Mojave American poet, Language Activist, Former Professional Basketball player, Educator
Natalie Diaz gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 26, 2021.

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and...

Camille T. Dungy

Poet and Professor
Camille T. Dungy gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 17, 2021.

Camille T. Dungy was a visiting writer with the Arts Research Center. Dungy was born and raised in the western United States (Colorado and California), though she has lived briefly in most other regions of the U.S. and has spent time on all but one continent and several countries. Dungy attributes some of the energy in her writing to both her delight in going new places and meeting new people and the good fortune of having a beautiful place to root down and call home. In much...

Cornelius Eady

Poet, Professor, Co-Founder of Cave Canem
Cornelius Eady was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Celebrating Cave Canem Conversation at the Arts Research Center on October 20, 2021.

Born on January 7, 1954, Cornelius Eady was raised in Rochester, New York. He attended Monroe Community College and Empire State College.

Eady is the author of several collections of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008); Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie...

Nadia Elbgal

Oakland Youth Laureate
Nadia Elbgal gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 20, 2023.

Nadia Elbgal is the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She is a Berkeley High graduate currently taking a few classes at Berkeley City College during her gap year. She is a Yemeni-American Muslim woman who advocates for and raises awareness on topics relating to the Middle Eastern and Muslim communities. Nadia has been a literacy mentor to Yemeni students in OUSD elementary schools as well as a teaching assistant in a mental health class at Hoover Elementary’s summer program. As an artist-...

Safia Elhillo

Poet
Safia Elhillo gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on Feb 23, 2021.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, ...

Diamela Eltit

Writer, Global Distinguished Professor at NYU
Diamela Eltit gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 11, 2018.

Diamela Eltit is one of Latin America’s most daring writers and is highly regarded for her avant-garde initiatives in the world of letters. Eltit began her engagement with literature in her native Chile during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship when she participated in the collective CADA, staging art actions against the dictatorship, and published her first novels, Lumpérica (1983) and Por la patria...

Tarfia Faizullah

Poet
Tarfia Faizullah gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2023.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, REGISTERS OF ILLUMINATED VILLAGES (Graywolf, 2018) and SEAM (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poet, Painter, Social Activist, Co-Founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
Lawrence Ferlinghetti gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on Feburary 8, 2017.

Poet, playwright, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling on March 24, 1919 in Yonkers, New York. His father, an Italian immigrant, had shortened the family name upon arrival in America. When Ferlinghetti discovered the lengthier name as an adult, he took it as his own. He had a tumultuous youth, parts of which were spent in France, an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York, and in the mansion of the wealthy Bisland family in Bronxville,...

Vievee Francis

Poet, Professor of Poetry & Poetics at Dartmouth College
Vievee Francis gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2023.

Vievee Francis was born in West Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year.

Francis is the author of The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and ...