Creative Writing

Moy Eng

Poet, Vocalist, and Leader of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust
Moy Eng was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Urban Ghosts Symposium at the Arts Research Center on January 17, 2017.

Moy Eng leads Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a community centered real estate organization for the arts. In deep partnerships with community, CAST invests and stewards affordable housing and workspaces across the San Francisco Bay Area. Launched in 2013, CAST has acquired and invested in six arts buildings in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, cited as a creative placekeeping model by cultural and civic leaders internationally...

Diamela Eltit

Writer, Global Distinguished Professor at NYU
Diamela Eltit gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 11, 2018.

Diamela Eltit is one of Latin America’s most daring writers and is highly regarded for her avant-garde initiatives in the world of letters. Eltit began her engagement with literature in her native Chile during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship when she participated in the collective CADA, staging art actions against the dictatorship, and published her first novels, Lumpérica (1983) and Por la patria...

Safia Elhillo

Poet
Safia Elhillo gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on Feb 23, 2021.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (link is external)(University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, ...

Nadia Elbgal

Oakland Youth Laureate
Nadia Elbgal gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 20, 2023.

Nadia Elbgal is the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She is a Berkeley High graduate currently taking a few classes at Berkeley City College during her gap year. She is a Yemeni-American Muslim woman who advocates for and raises awareness on topics relating to the Middle Eastern and Muslim communities. Nadia has been a literacy mentor to Yemeni students in OUSD elementary schools as well as a teaching assistant in a mental health class at Hoover Elementary’s summer program. As an artist-...

Cornelius Eady

Poet, Professor, Co-Founder of Cave Canem
Cornelius Eady was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Celebrating Cave Canem Conversation at the Arts Research Center on October 20, 2021.

Born on January 7, 1954, Cornelius Eady was raised in Rochester, New York. He attended Monroe Community College and Empire State College.

Eady is the author of several collections of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008); Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie...

Camille T. Dungy

Poet and Professor
Camille T. Dungy gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 17, 2021.

Camille T. Dungy was a visiting writer with the Arts Research Center. Dungy was born and raised in the western United States (Colorado and California), though she has lived briefly in most other regions of the U.S. and has spent time on all but one continent and several countries. Dungy attributes some of the energy in her writing to both her delight in going new places and meeting new people and the good fortune of having a beautiful place to root down and call home. In much...

Natalie Diaz

Mojave American poet, Language Activist, Former Professional Basketball player, Educator
Natalie Diaz gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 26, 2021.

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and...

Ahmad Diab

ARC Fellow and Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Cinema at UC Berkeley
Ahmad Diab was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Ahmad Diab is a Palestinian writer and academic. He is assistant professor of modern Arabic literature and cinema (20th and 21st centuries) at University of California, Berkeley. His work contemplates the relationship between displacement and representation. He received his B.A. from Damascus University. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is currently...

Al-An deSouza

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Al-An deSouza was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Al-An deSouza works across photo-media, installation, text and performance works as staging grounds for historical memory and its legacies upon the present. Their works draw upon formal and informal archives, remaking them through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY, Krannert Museum, IL; Phillips...

Jen de los Reyes

Artist, Educator Community Arts Organizer
Jen de los Reyes was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 13, 2015.

Jen de los Reyes was born in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and educated first in its local music scene of the mid-90’s infused with the energy of Riot grrrl and DIY, and then in its university. [1] How she works today is rooted in what she learned in her formative years as a show organizer, listener, creator of zines, and band member. Graduate work at the University of Regina made the space possible for her to see her...