Creative Writing

Iain Boal

Social Historian of Science and Technics
Iain Boal gave a Visiting Lecturer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on Feburary 1, 2017.

Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California and Birkbeck College, London. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artists and artisans based for two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is particularly interested in the relations between art, science, and representation. He is a founder of the new field of agnotology (a term he coined), the systematic study of ignorance and the long shadows cast by...

Zachary Blinkinsop

ARC Fellow and Graduate Student in Scandinavian Studies at UC Berkeley
Zachary Blinkinsop was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2018 – he was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category. A Third Culture Kid and Air Force brat who grew up in Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Zachary Blinkinsop’s academic engagement with literature is tied closely to his interest in national identity. white space He earned his B.A. in...

Kaylan Black

2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate
Kaylan Black gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Kaylan Black, 2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate and a member of the National Society of High School Scholars. At the time of her Flash Poetry reading in April 2023, she had been accepted into 3 colleges early as a 17 year-old and Senior at Oakland Charter High School. She has been on the African American Honor Roll and Achievement, Honor Roll, and a Junior Community Organizer with ACCE.

Sherwin Bitsui

Writer, Poet, and Professor of English at Northern Arizona University
Sherwin Bitsui gave a Visiting Writer Reading and Lecture at the Arts Research Center on September 5, 2024.

Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the poetry collections Dissolve (2018), Flood Song (2009), and Shapeshift (2003).

Steeped in Native American culture, mythology, and history, Bitsui’s poems reveal the tensions in the...

Dodie Bellamy

Novelist, Poet, and Essayist
Dodie Bellamy gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist with an extensive body of work that includes many books and a handful of chapbooks. Her writing is known for its genre-bending approach, focusing on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts, and all things queer. She champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, and the troubled. Bellamy believes that the spiritual and the political can be discovered in the most unexpected places...

Evan Bissell

ARC Fellow, Artist, Researcher, Facilitator, and Administrator
Evan Bissell was an ARC Fellow in 2015 – he was chosen in the graduate and faculty category.

Evan Bissell (he/him, white) facilitates participatory art and research projects that support equitable systems and liberatory processes. With groups around the country, he has supported the development of curriculum, public art, laws, books, and convenings that build imagination, power and capacity around the just transition, anti-prison and police efforts, housing justice, and health equity, among others. Most recently Evan created the Arts & Cultural Strategy program at the...

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Poet
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 26, 2021.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father who was the son of Dutch immigrants. Her mother was a mathematician, and her maternal grandmother received a college education in prerevolutionary China. Her father was employed at the American Embassy in Chungking, and later pursued Far Eastern studies at Harvard University. Her family moved to the United States when she was a year old. She earned a BA from Reed College...

Jasper Bernes

ARC Fellow and Continuing Lecturer of English at UC Berkeley
Jasper Bernes was an ARC Fellow in 2009 – he was chosen in the faculty category.

Jasper Bernes is author of a scholarly book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, 2017), and two books of poetry, Starsdown (2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015). Essays, poems and other writings can be found in Critical Inquiry, Modern Language Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Endnotes, Lana Turner, The American Reader, and elsewhere. Together with Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune...

JD Beltran

Artist/Filmmaker, Inventor, Journalist, Writer, Designer, Educator, Creativity Cheerleader, and Founder/Director of Center for Creative Sustainability
JD Beltran was a Visiting Curator Panel Participant at the "ART/CITY" Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 16, 2012. JD Beltran is an award-winning creative, journalist, and policymaker with extensive experience in design & technology, sustainability, culture, and art. She is the Founder & Director of the Center for Creative Sustainability consultancy in San Francisco and is a professor in Design at San Francisco State University. Beltran's work has won myriad awards, having been exhibited worldwide including at the Walker Art Center, the...

Roberto Bedoya

Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland
Roberto Bedoy was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Urban Ghosts Conversation on January 17, 2017.

Roberto Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, where he recently shepherded its Cultural Plan, Belonging in Oakland: a Cultural Development Plan. Throughout his career, Bedoya has consistently supported artist-centered cultural practices and advocated for expanded definitions of inclusion and belonging in the cultural sector. His essays, “U.S. Cultural Policy; Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential;” “Creative Placemaking and...