Creative Writing

Việt Lê

Artist, Writer, Chair of Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts
Việt Lê gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past twenty years examines spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in...

Anastasia Le

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Anastasia Le was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Undergraduate Fellow category.

Anastasia Le is a poet and printmaker from the Lake Chabot area of the East Bay. Her work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review’s Midterm Five: Interlace/Intersect, the 2021 Southeast Asian Student Coalition anthology, and on the walls of her former co-op. She approaches poetry with a Vietnamese linguistic sensibility, but writes in English—she’s working on that. You can find her behind...

Thomas Jean Lax

Writer and Curator in the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA
Thomas Jean Lax was a Visiting Curator/Moderator at the Visual Activism Conference at the Arts Research Center on November 12, 2020.

Thomas Jean Lax is a curator and writer specializing in black art, queer study and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, they organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) about the gallery, founded by ...

Grace Lavery

ARC Fellow, Associate Professor of English Critical Theory and Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley
Grace Lavery was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2016 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her...

Claudia La Rocco

Poet, Critic, and Performer
Claudia La Rocco gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 21, 2013.

Claudia La Rocco is the author of Drive By (Smooth Friend, 2022); Certain Things (Afternoon Editions, 2022); Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020); petit cadeau (The Chocolate Factory, 2015); and The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited, 2014).

Her prose poem I am trying to do the assignment was published by [2nd floor projects] as a limited-edition chapbook. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of...

Rachel Kushner

Writer
Rachel Kushner gave a Visiting Writer Talk at the Arts Research Center on October 27, 2017.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 will be published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio...

Dana Koster

Poet and Photographer
Dana Koster gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in October 2021, part of the Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Dana Koster was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Ventura, California. She earned her English degree from UC Berkeley and MFA in poetry from Cornell University. From 2011-2013, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two children, where she works as a wedding photographer, occasional freelance writer and half of the art...

Ava Koohbor

Poet, Visual, and Sound Artist
Ava Koohbor gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Ava Koohbor is a native Farsi-speaker poet and visual artist who now lives in San Francisco. Many of her poems have been appeared in various magazines. Her chapbook, Triangle Squared, a fictional conversation among John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Morton Feldman, has been published by Bootstrap Press. She’s now working with poet Patrick James Dunagan on translating Hafez’s poems from Farsi into English. She...

Fede Kong-Gonzalez

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Fede Kong-Gonzalez was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – they were chosen in the Undergraduate Fellow category.

Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge from a project having pulled out something they could never quite grab at before. Fede...

Alexandra Kleeman

ARC Fellow, Writer, and Assistant Professor of Writing at the New School
Alexandra Kleeman was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2010 – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novel Something New Under the Sun, Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2022.

Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,...