Creative Writing

Aimee Suzara

ARC Fellow, Writer, Performer, and Educator

Oakland-Based Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. As a playwright, her new work THE REAL SAPPHO was commissioned by Cutting Ball Theater and awarded by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works fund and National Endowment for the Arts, and TINY FIRES will have its World Premiere in 2023. Her poetry book SOUVENIR (2014) was a Willa Award Finalist, and her poems appear in ...

Hito Steyerl

Filmmaker, Moving Image Artist, Writer, and Professor of New Media Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer. She teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. Steyerl studied film at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The most formative parts of her education, however, include working as a stunt-girl and bouncer. Steyerl’s work focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire by using humor, charm, and reduced gravity as political means of expression. Her sources range...

Juliana Spahr

Poet, Critic, Editor, and Professor and Unit Chair of Arts & Humanities at Mills College at Northeastern University

Juliana Spahr is a poet & scholar of 20th c. literature. Her poetry moves between lyricism, explanatory prose, and theoretical discussion. In her most recent book, That Winter The Wolf Came, concerns global struggle, especially those located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Previous to this, she has published four full-length collections of poems and two books of prose that might be memoirs. Dr. Spahr’s scholarly work is about literature’s complicated role in political movements.

Patricia Smith

ARC Fellow, Poet, Spoken-Word Performer, Playwright, Author, Writing Teacher, and Former Journalist.

Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, includingUnshuttered (Feb 2023);Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the2018 Pulitzer...

Danez Smith

ARC Fellow, Poet, Writer, and Performer

Danez Smith is the author of three collections including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. They have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez's poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry and on the Late Show with...

Pamela Sneed

Poet, Performance Artist, Actress, Activist, and Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University

Pamela Sneed is a New York–based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery (Holt, 1998), KONG and Other Works (Vintage Entity Press, 2009), Sweet Dreams (Belladonna*, 2018), and Funeral Diva, published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, Artnet, and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry....

SA Smythe

Writer, Artist, and Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA

SA Smythe is a blktrans nonbinary theorist, multi-instrumentalist, transmedia storyteller, and educator currently based in Tkaronto and Rome. Smythe’s antecartographic practice conjures black belonging and is concerned with the thrival of our relations beyond every border. They weave blktrans poetics, performance, light sculptures, sound composition, photography, and found footage/archival ephemera. Smythe’s transmedia work has been featured internationally in collaborative and solo performance exhibitions, film and multimedia installations,...

Jake Skeets

ARC Fellow, Poet, and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oklahoma

Jake Skeets (he/him) is Tsi’naajínii born for Tábąąhá; his maternal grandparents are the Táchii’nii and his paternal grandparents are the Tódík’ózhí. Skeets is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. His debut collection of poetry, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, is a winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. His honors include a 2020-2021 Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

His poems and essays have been...

Maya Sisneros

Writer and Undergraduate Advisor in the UC Berkeley School of Education

Maya Sisnerosis a Bay Area-based writer whose poetry and fiction explore identity, intimacy, and lines of f/light. She is a recipient of the inaugural 2021 SFF/Nomadic Press Lit Award and AWP's 2021 Kurt Brown Prize for Fiction. She attended a Tin House Summer Workshop in 2021. Maya is currently at work on a novella of speculative fiction.

Kevin Simmonds

Musician and Writer

Kevin Simmonds is a musician and writer originally from New Orleans. He studied music at Vanderbilt University, Middle Tennessee State University and completed the Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina. He founded Tono International Arts Association, an international arts presenter in northern Japan (Iwate Prefecture).

Kevin received a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he started the first-ever poetry workshop in Changi Prison. He has published poems, essays and reviews in American Scholar, Bellevue Review, FIELD, jubilat...