Creative Writing

C.S. Giscombe

Poet, Essayist, Robert Hass Chair in English at UC Berkeley

C.S. Giscombe was born in 1950 in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated with degrees in English from University at Albany and Cornell University. At Cornell, he edited Epoch magazine.

Giscombe’s books include Negro Mountain (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Similarly (Dalkey Archive, 2020); Border Towns (Dalkey Archive, 2016); Ohio Railroads (Omnidawn, 2014); Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008); Giscome Road (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998); and Here (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994). Giscombe is also the...

Aracelis Girmay

Poet, Professor of English at Stanford University

Born and raised in Santa Ana, California, poet Aracelis Girmay earned a BA at Connecticut College and an MFA from New York University. Her poems trace the connections of transformation and loss across cities and bodies.

In her 2011 online chat interview with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, Girmay discussed innovative and hybrid poetric forms, stating, “I wonder what new explorations of form might have to do with documenting the new and old ways of thinking about power. Of how we’ve been taught to think by our families,...

Rebecca Gaydos

2011 ARC Fellow

Rebecca Gaydos was born in Santa Barbara, California, where her mother and father worked as professional ballet dancers. At UC Berkeley, she won the Eisner Prize in Poetry and earned her Ph.D. in English. She has taught literature and writing at Diablo Valley College, San Quentin State Prison, and UC Berkeley. Currently, in addition to writing poetry, she is editing an unpublished novella by poet Larry Eigner and completing a scholarly book on the significance of technoscientific thought in post-World War II American poetry.

Rebecca was an ARC...

Ross Gay

Poet, Essayist

Ross Gay is interested in joy.

Ross Gay wants to understand joy.

Ross Gay is curious about joy.

Ross Gay studies joy.

Something like that.

~

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays...

Malik Gaines

Associate Professor at NYU Tisch

Malik Gaines is a writer and artist involved with performances.

His articles have appeared in Women & Performance and Art Journal, and in magazines including Artforum. Gaines has written many essays for museum books, about artists including the Judson Dance Theater, Lorraine O’Grady, Senga Nengudi, Pope.L, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Ed Bereal, and many others. His book Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (2017, NYU Press) traces a circulation of black leftist political...

Memory Paths and Fragments from the Past: A Poetry Reading with Deborah Miranda in Conversation with Estelle Tarica

March 6, 2024
Eva Whitney

On January 29, 2024, the Arts Research Center welcomed writer Deborah Miranda for a reading followed by a conversation with Estelle Tarica, Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese (event info here). The full recording of the event is available for viewing on ARC’s YouTube channel, here

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Gloria Frym

Poet, Fiction Writer, Professor at California College of the Arts Graduate Writing Program

Gloria Frym is a poet and fiction writer. Her collection of essays, How Proust Ruined My Life, was published by BlazeVox Books in 2020. Her other books include The True Patriot, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015); The Stage Stop Motel (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014); Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX books, 2011); Any Time Soon (Little Red Leaves, 2010); The Lost Poems of Sappho (Effing Press, 2007) and Solution Simulacra...

Vievee Francis

Poet, Professor of Poetry & Poetics at Dartmouth College

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 Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006).

The poet...

Jennifer Foerster

Poet, Writer


Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, The Maybe Bird (The Song Cave, 2022), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Leaving Tulsa (University of Arizona Press, 2013), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2020).

She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a...

Courtney Fink

Former Executive Director of Southern Exposure, Organizer, Arts Advocate, Curator, Writer
Courtney Fink (she/her) works in the expanded field of nonprofit leadership as a steadfast champion of visual artists and the organizations that center and support them. Her hybrid practice merges creative process with strategic implementation and is informed by responsive open source frameworks as models for exchange, connection, collaboration, and shared experience. Fink’s mission is to establish equitable access to ideas and projects in which artists and experimental platforms are positioned to manifest social change.

For 30 years Courtney has employed a...