Visiting Writer

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Spoken Word Artist, Writer, Librettist, and Cultural Strategist
Marc Bamuthi Joseph was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Situated: A Rite to Heal Symposium at the Arts Research Center on October 10, 2011.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An internationally...

Gary Kamiya

Author, Journalist and Historian of San Francisco
Gary Kamiya gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on June 5, 2015.

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland, grew up in Berkeley and have lived in San Francisco since 1971. He received my BA and MA in English literature from UC Berkeley, where he won the Mark Schorer Citation. Kamiya was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of the groundbreaking web site Salon.com, where he reported from the Middle East, covered three Olympics, and wrote about politics, pop culture, literature, art, music and sports. Until March 2018 he was the executive editor...

Kealoha

Hawaiʻi's First Poet Laureate Emeritus
Kealoha gave a Visiting Writer Talk and Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023.

Kealoha is Hawaiʻi's first Poet Laureate Emeritus. As an internationally acclaimed poet and storyteller, he has performed throughout the world -- from the White House to the ʻIolani Palace, from Brazil to Switzerland. He is the first poet in Hawaiʻi's history to perform at a governor's inauguration, was selected as a master artist for a National Endowment for the Arts program, was named an American Academy of Poets Laureate Fellow, and...

Rachel Kushner

Writer
Rachel Kushner gave a Visiting Writer Talk at the Arts Research Center on October 27, 2017.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 will be published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio...

Claudia La Rocco

Poet, Critic, and Performer
Claudia La Rocco gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 21, 2013.

Claudia La Rocco is the author of Drive By (Smooth Friend, 2022); Certain Things (Afternoon Editions, 2022); Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020); petit cadeau (The Chocolate Factory, 2015); and The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited, 2014).

Her prose poem I am trying to do the assignment was published by [2nd floor projects] as a limited-edition chapbook. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of...

Lili Loofbourow

Staff writer at Slate
Lili Loofbourow gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 29, 2016.

Lili Loofbourow is a staff writer at Slate. Before that, The Week. An essay of hers was in Best American Essays 2019, and she won the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Staige D. Blackford Prize for Creative Nonfiction for ...

J. Michael Martinez

Poet and Assistant Professor of Poetry at San Jose State
J. Michael Martinez gave a Visiting Writer Reading/Conversation at the Arts Research Center on September 28, 2023.

J. Michael Martinez was born and raised in Greeley, Colorado. He is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado and received an MFA from George Mason University. In 2009, Martinez’s collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award and was published by Louisiana State...

Maggie Nelson

Writer and Professor of English at the University of Southern California
Maggie Nelson gave a Visiting Writer Lecture/Conversation at the Arts Research Center on January 30, 2017.

Poet, scholar, and nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson earned a PhD in English literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work is often described as genre crossing or hybrid; she has noted her interest in poet Eileen Myles’s idea of “vernacular scholarship,” adding, “I need to talk back, or talk with, theorists and philosophers in ordinary language, to dramatize how much their ideas matter...

dg nanouk okpik

IPL Fellow and Poet
dg was an Indigenous Poetics Lab Fellow in Spring 2024.

dg nanouk okpik is an Iñupiaq-Inuit poet from south-central Alaska. Her debut collection of poetry, Corpse Whale (2012), received the American Book Award (2013). Since then, her work has been published in several anthologies, including New Poets of Native Nations (2018) and the forthcoming Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (2023). With her new collection Blood Snow,...

Dave Pell

Writer and Managing Editor of NextDraft
Dave Pell gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on May 1, 2017.

Dave Pell has been writing online for almost as long as the internet has existed. His popular newsletter NextDraft has over 140,000 subscribers. NextDraft covers the day’s ten most fascinating news stories, delivered with a fast and pithy wit.

Dave has been a syndicated writer on NPR, Gizmodo, Forbes, and Huffington Post. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from U.C. Berkeley, and his master’s in education from Harvard.

Besides being a prolific writer,...