Creative Writing

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...

Christian Nagler

ARC Fellow, Performer, Writer, and Translator
Christian Nagler was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2017 – he was chosen in the Graduate category.

Christian Nagler is a performer, writer and translator. His work looks at (and performs) the imbrications of embodiment and global economics both in his everyday life and in projects like Market Fitness, and Yoga for Adjuncts. Nagler has performed with Anna Halprin, Isak...

Jesse Nathan

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Jesse Nathan was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

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...

Ramona Naddaff

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Ramona Naddaff was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2021 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

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...

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...