Creative Writing

Beth Piatote

ARC Director, 2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry and the Senses
Beth Piatote Director, Arts Research Center


Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English

Beth Piatote is a creative writer, playwright, and scholar. She is the author of two books, including the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. The Beadworkers was named the winner of the 2020 Electa Quinney Award for Published Stories. Her...

Jesse Nathan

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Jesse Nathan’s poems appear in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, FENCE, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. His translations of Alfonsina Storni and Brenda Solís-Fong in Mantis and Poetry International. Nathan was born in Berkeley, where he lived until he was ten; he spent the second half of his childhood on a wheat farm in rural Kansas. Nathan moved to San Francisco after college, in part to take a position at McSweeney’s. His work has been supported by the...

Ramona Naddaff

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Ramona Naddaff is the author of a collection of prose-poems, Paris/Paris (Tête d’Affiche, 1991) and of a permanent installation of a poem-collage, “Ancient Greece and Democracy” in the Lisbon metro station. She has written a scholarly monograph, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic (University of Chicago, 2002) as well as essays on ancient Greek philosophy and literature, and on literary censorship. She is currently completing a manuscript on the writing practices of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, Never Alone: The Making...

Sara Mumolo

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

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 Lana Turner, ...

Rusty Morrison

2020 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

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. She is the co-publisher of Omnidawn. She teaches and gives writing consultations.

Rusty was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2020 with the...

Nathalie Khankan

2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Nathalie Khankan is the author of quiet orient riot (Fall 2020), winner of Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin. Her work appears in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, The Volta, and Crab Creek Review. Straddling Danish, Finnish, Syrian and Palestinian homes and heirlooms, Nathalie currently lives in San Francisco. She teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley.

Natalie was an ARC Fellow in Spring & Fall 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen...

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

2019 ARC Fellow

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer and healer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. Her practice serves as a bridge, merging the intersections of art, activism, spirituality and healing as tools for retrieval. Her healing practice consists of being a catalyst for retrieval through the usage of reiki,...

Sarah Hennessey

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Sarah Hennessey is Nimíipuu and she is a poet, performer, playwright, and youth empowerment theater practitioner. Her work highlights the symbiosis of storytelling and language reclamation. By integrating her penchant for literature and performance into her educational outreach, Sarah infuses her instruction with not just interdisciplinary pedagogy, but also both traditional and contemporary storytelling techniques. Her work has been published in literary journals such as Yellow Medicine Review and Pork Belly Press. Her first short play Weet’u...

Dr. Ines Hernandez-Avila

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Professor Hernandez-Avila is Niimiipuu/Nez Perce, of Chief Joseph’s band, enrolled on the Colville Reservation, Washington, on her mother’s side, and Tejana (and Mexican Indigenous) on her father’s side. A scholar, poet, and visual artist, her research and teaching focus on contemporary Indigenous literature of the Americas, and Indigenous religious traditions. She is a Ford Foundation Fellow at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, and a member of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows. She is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies...

Maura Adela Cruz

2023/24 ARC Fellow - Indigenous Poetics Lab

Maura Adela Cruz (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley pursuing a degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing. She was raised in California’s Central Valley to an Indigenous farmworker community and is of Zapotec and Mixtec descent. Maura’s poetry focuses on Zapotec language revitalization while also examining the circumstances imposed by settler-colonial nation-states like the U.S. and Mexico. Her poetic work seeks to document and preserve the cultural histories and worldviews embedded within her Indigenous Zapotec...