Creative Writing

Zouhair Mussa

Community organizer and Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Zouhair Mussa gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Zouhair Mussa is a Sudanese/Nubian-American community organizer and multi-disciplinary artist from West Oakland. His art is based on the life he has lived and aims at addressing that which is detrimental to him and his community. He seeks to shed light on injustices that plague the places he calls home. He uses his art to remember the fallen and dreams of healing the struggle. Most importantly, he wants to uplift and inspire change...

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 ...

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...

Benjamin Morgan

ARC Fellow and Associate Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago
Benjamin Morgan was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2009 – he was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Benjamin Morgan's first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion generated new and controversial explanations of the human experience of the arts. The book reflects on the long history of using evolutionary theory and cognitive science to make sense of art and literature and develops some theoretical tools for articulating the...

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...

Trịnh Thị Minh Hà

Filmmaker, Writer, Literary Theorist, Composer, and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley
Trịnh Thị Minh Hà was a Affiliated Faculty Panel Participant at the Curating People Symposium at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2011.

Originally trained as a musical composer, who received her two masters and Ph.D. from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Trịnh Thị Minh Hà is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women’s work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. She has also taught at Harvard, Smith, Cornell, San Francisco State...

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...

Christopher Patrick Miller

ARC Fellow and English Department Chair and Upper School Faculty at Oregon Episcopal School
Christopher Patrick Miller was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2011 – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Christopher Patrick Miller, who joins the English Department, has been working as an educator for the last 12 years at a wide range of institutions: St. Paul's School, University of California, Bard College, Saint Louis University, and the Nueva School. Thinking across disciplines has been crucial to his diverse approaches to reading and writing, as he began his studies with a B.A. in Architecture and English from Syracuse University, worked as a...

Florencia Milito

Poet and Teacher in California Poets in the Schools
Florencia Milito gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in November 2021, part of the Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Florencia Milito is a bilingual poet whose work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Indiana Review, Catamaran, Diálogo, 92nd Street Y, Quiet Lightning, Ninth Letter, Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, Zócalo Public Square,womensvoicesforchange.org,GUEST, and...

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,...