Creative Writing

Nellie Wong

Poet, Socialist Feminist Activist

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Nellie Wong was born in Oakland, California, on September 12, 1934. As a teenager she worked in her parents’ Chinese restaurant, and after graduating high school, she took a job as a secretary for Bethlehem Steel Corporation, where she worked until 1982. In her mid-thirties, she began studying creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Wong published her first book of poetry, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (Kelsey Street Press), in 1983. That same year, she served as a delegate on the first United States Women...

Christian Nagler

ARC Fellow, Performer, Writer, and Translator

Christian Nagler is a performer, writer and translator. His work looks at (and performs) the imbrications of embodiment and global economics both in his everyday life and in projects like Market Fitness, and Yoga for Adjuncts. Nagler has performed with Anna Halprin, Isak Immanuel, Yuko Kaseki and Open Experiments Ensemble. His work has recently been presented at the...

Ramona Naddaff

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Ramona Naddaff is the author of a collection of prose-poems, Paris/Paris (Tête d’Affiche, 1991) and of a permanent installation of a poem-collage, “Ancient Greece and Democracy” in the Lisbon metro station. She has written a scholarly monograph, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic (University of Chicago, 2002) as well as essays on ancient Greek philosophy and literature, and on literary censorship. She is currently completing a manuscript on the writing practices of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, Never Alone: The Making...

Simone White

Poet, Professor

Simone White is the author of or, on being the other woman (Duke University Press, 2022), Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and House Envy of All the World (Factory School, 2010), the poetry chapbook, Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, Dolly (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her poetry and prose have been featured in Artforum...

Mac Wellman

Playwright, Author, Poet

Mac Wellman’s recent work includes: The Offending Gesture, directed by Meghan Finn at the Connelly Theater in 2016; Horrocks (and Toutatis Too) Woo World Wu at Emerson College in Boston in 2013 (with Erin Mallon & Tim Sirgusa); Muazzez at the Chocolate Factory (PS122’s COIL Festival) with Steve Mellor, in 2014; 3 2’s; or AFAR at Dixon Place in October 2011, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (with composer David Lang) at Montclair in the fall of 2006 (and elsewhere more recently); and 1965 UU for performer Paul Lazar, and directed by Stephen Mellor at the...

Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Art, Activism, and Technology: The 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement

Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium is an internationally recognized forum for presenting new ideas that challenge conventional wisdom about art, technology, and culture. This series, free of charge and open to the public, presents artists, writers, curators, and scholars who consider contemporary issues at the intersection of aesthetic expression, emerging technologies, and cultural history, from a critical perspective. For the first time ever, the 2014/15 lecture series will be co-presented by...

Michael Wasson

Poet

Michael Wasson is Nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lenore, Idaho. His poetry collection This American Ghost (YesYes Books) was winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize. He was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow and a 2018 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow in Literature. His book Swallowed Light is forthcoming in spring 2022 from Copper Canyon Press. He currently lives in Japan.

Jenny Xie

Poet & Educator

​Jenny Xie was born in Anhui province, China. She is the author of EYE LEVEL, a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and THE RUPTURE TENSE, a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the Josephine Miles Award. Her chapbook, NOWHERE TO ARRIVE, received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and...

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Spoken Word Artist, Writer, Librettist, and Cultural Strategist

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An internationally renowned cultural strategist, Bamuthi is the co-creator of the paradigm-shifting allyship training...

Beth Piatote

ARC Director, 2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry and the Senses

Beth Piatote is a creative writer, playwright, and scholar. She is the author of two books, including the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. The Beadworkers was named the winner of the 2020 Electa Quinney Award for Published Stories. Her full-length play...