Creative Writing

Sean San José

Writer, Director, Performer, and Co-Founder of Campo Santo
Sean San José was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the Chavez Ravine Conference and Performances at the Arts Research Center on March 4, 2016.

Sean San José is a writer, director, performer, and co-founder of Campo Santo, a new performance group for People of Color in San Francisco. Founded in 1996, Campo Santo is committed to developing new performance and to nurturing People of Color centered new audiences and has premiered over 100 new pieces. For 15 years, he was the Program Director of Performance under Deborah Cullinan, alongside Kevin B. Chen & Rebeka...

Blossom Johnson

ARC Indigenous Performing Arts Residency AIR, Diné playwright, Screenwriter and Dramaturg
Blossom Johnson is the ARC Indigenous Performing Arts Residency's first-ever artist-in-residence (2024).

Blossom Johnson is a Diné storyteller, playwright, teaching artist and screenwriter. She is from the Yé’ii Dine’é Táchii’nii (Giant People) clan, and her maternal grandfather is from the Deeshchíí’nii (Start of the Red Streak People) clan.

She was raised by her grandmother on the very top of Dził Yijiin (Black Mesa), AZ and she’s always been surrounded by stories. When she opens the front door of her grandma’s yellow house, she can see a coal mine. Below the mesa...

Adriana Johnson

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine
Adriana Johnson was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Art as Critique Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 1, 2019.

Adriana Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Irvine. Her first book was Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (2010). She is finishing Infrastructures of Visuality in Latin America, and planning Thinking Water, about how visual forms in Latin America materialize a knowledge of drought, rivers, rains, and sea.

Fiza Jihan

Artist working in Videography, Writing, and Sound
Fiza Jihan gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Fiza Jihan is a filmmaker whose creative work is devotional in nature, spiritually inclined and currently a reflection on grief, familial ties, migration, and friendship. Their processes inform each other and are integrated; they work with prose, videography, and sound to move through personal emotional realities and catalyze new somatic experiences for others.

Mason J.

Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist
Mason J. gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Mason J. is an Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist, inspired by life as a born raised, and displaced Black and Indigenous San Francisco Local, Sick/Disabled Queer Two-Spirit, and Land Use advocate. Their photographs, poetry, dance, and social commentary have been published in many a zine, at various festivals, all around the internet, and in print. After receiving the inaugural James C. Hormel Center Fellowship from 2017–2019...

Ra Malika Imhotep

Black Feminist Writer, Performance Artist, and PhD Candidate of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley
Ra Malika Imhotep gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Their academic and creative work tends the relationships between Black femininity, Southern vernacular aesthetics, and the performance of labor. They are a co-convener of the embodied spiritual-...

Amanda Galvan Huynh

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Amanda Galvan Huynh was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with University of Hawaiʻiy – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her) is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author Where My Umbilical is Buried (Sundress Publications 2023), a chapbook Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks September 2019), and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019). Amanda has been...

Rina Huang

2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate
Rina Huang gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Rina Huang is still a half-child, teetering on the brink of adulthood. She is co-editor of The Steele in which she also publishes frequently. A soon-to-be graduate of the College Preparatory School in Oakland, as well as a soon-to-be-freshman at Amherst College, she finds herself at the constant cruz of exploration, of newness. She is an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and the California...

Hua Hsu

Staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of English at Bard College
Hua Hsu gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 17, 2016.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the memoir Stay True (September 2022). He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. Hsu is a contributor to CBS News’s Sunday Morning; serves on the governance board of Critical...

Jane Hirshfield

Poet, Essayist, and Translator
Jane Hirshfield gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. A poet, translator, essayist, and editor, she received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Hirshfield’s books of poetry include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023); Ledger...