Creative Writing

Darius Simpson

Writer, Educator, and Performer

Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. He received an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Mills College. Darius was a recipient of the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is the author of Never Catch Me (Button Poetry, 2022).​ He hopes to inspire that feeling you get that makes you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius...

Kim Shuck

Poet, Author, Weaver, and Bead Worker

Kim Shuck embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot. Her maternal grandparents met at the Polish Hall on Shotwell and she spent many hours with her mother and grandmother wandering the Mission St. Miracle Mile, taking books out of the Mission Branch library and watching aquarium fish on the ground floor of what used to be Hale's. She firmly believes in carrying a bubble wand, keys, pen and notebook and cats cradle string at all times.

Shuck is widely...

Tiffany Shlaine

Filmmaker, Artist, and Author

Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, speaker,bestselling author, and ...

Solmaz Sharif

Poet and Professor of English at UC Berkeley

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston...

Craig Santos Perez

Poet, Essayist, and Publisher

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro from Mongmong, Guam. In 1995, his family moved to California. He lived there for fifteen years before moving to Hawai‘i. Perez earned his BA in literature and creative writing in 2002 at the University of Redlands in California and his MFA in poetry at the University of San Francisco in 2006.

Perez has authored six books of poetry: From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023), which was the winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry; Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn Publishing, 2020);...

Ellen Samuels

Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Ellen Samuels is an associate professor and a founding member of the UW Disability Studies Initiative. She is the author of Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (NYU, 2014) and her critical work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Signs, Disability Studies Quarterly, Feminist Disability Studies, GLQ, MELUS,The Disability Studies Reader, and ...

Poulomi Saha

Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley

Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, Poulomi Saha works at the intersections of Asian American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. Their work spans from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power in the 20th century.

They are currently working on book about America’s long obsession with Indian spirituality and why so often those groups come to be called cults. Fascination:...

Paul Roquet

ARC Fellow and Associate Professor in Media Studies and Japan Studies at MIT's Comparative Media Studies & Writing Program

Paul Roquet is an associate professor in media studies and Japan studies at MIT's Comparative Media Studies / Writing program. His research focuses on how media becomes environmental and the implications of this mediation on everyday spatial awareness.

Roquet's first book, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016; available open access via Manifold and PDF), delves into the use of music, video art, cinema, and literature to create "healing" atmospheres designed for relaxation and reflection. The book establishes a...

Ocean Vuong

Writer, Professor, Photographer

Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author ofOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner ofthe American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author...

Natalia Vigil

Writer, Arts Administrator

Natalia Vigil is a queer Xicana writer with native heritage, multimedia curator, and big sister of six, born and raised in San Francisco. She is the co-founder of Still Here San Francisco for which she was honored as a Local Hero by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. She is an arts administrator passionate about community-driven creativity and cultural preservation through artist sustainability.

Currently, Natalia is responsible for all aspects of community engagement, grantmaking, research, accountability, and learning in the Walter...