Creative Writing

Nathalie Khankan

2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Natalie Khankan was an ARC Fellow in Spring & Fall 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Nathalie Khankan is the author of quiet orient riot (Fall 2020), winner of Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin. Her work appears in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, The Volta, and Crab Creek Review. Straddling Danish, Finnish, Syrian and Palestinian homes and heirlooms, Nathalie currently lives in San Francisco. She teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of...

Maurya Kerr

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Maurya Kerr was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, including Inverted Syntax, Chestnut Review, Tupelo Quarterly, little somethings press, and an anthology, “The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.” Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on Black...

Kealoha

Hawaiʻi's First Poet Laureate Emeritus
Kealoha gave a Visiting Writer Talk and Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023.

Kealoha is Hawaiʻi's first Poet Laureate Emeritus. As an internationally acclaimed poet and storyteller, he has performed throughout the world -- from the White House to the ʻIolani Palace, from Brazil to Switzerland. He is the first poet in Hawaiʻi's history to perform at a governor's inauguration, was selected as a master artist for a National Endowment for the Arts program, was named an American Academy of Poets Laureate Fellow, and...

Gary Kamiya

Author, Journalist and Historian of San Francisco
Gary Kamiya gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on June 5, 2015.

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland, grew up in Berkeley and have lived in San Francisco since 1971. He received my BA and MA in English literature from UC Berkeley, where he won the Mark Schorer Citation. Kamiya was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of the groundbreaking web site Salon.com, where he reported from the Middle East, covered three Olympics, and wrote about politics, pop culture, literature, art, music and sports. Until March 2018 he was the executive editor...

Leena Joshi

ARC Fellow, Artist, Writer, and Educator
Leena Joshi was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – they were chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Leena Joshi is an artist, poet, and educator working across sculpture, video, performance, and text. Their work considers experiences of desire, illness, and the labor of appearance for queer, racialized, and trans people, often engaging the digital and speculative as spaces to explore a shifting, illegible, and expansive definition of personhood. Joshi’s work is curious about new forms and practices in an embrace of amateurism and play. Leena’s poetry and written work...

Sean San José

Writer, Director, Performer, and Co-Founder of Campo Santo
Sean San José was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the Chavez Ravine Conference and Performances at the Arts Research Center on March 4, 2016.

Sean San José is a writer, director, performer, and co-founder of Campo Santo, a new performance group for People of Color in San Francisco. Founded in 1996, Campo Santo is committed to developing new performance and to nurturing People of Color centered new audiences and has premiered over 100 new pieces. For 15 years, he was the Program Director of Performance under Deborah Cullinan, alongside Kevin B. Chen & Rebeka...

Blossom Johnson

ARC Indigenous Performing Arts Residency AIR, Diné playwright, Screenwriter and Dramaturg
Blossom Johnson is the ARC Indigenous Performing Arts Residency's first-ever artist-in-residence (2024).

Blossom Johnson is a Diné storyteller, playwright, teaching artist and screenwriter. She is from the Yé’ii Dine’é Táchii’nii (Giant People) clan, and her maternal grandfather is from the Deeshchíí’nii (Start of the Red Streak People) clan.

She was raised by her grandmother on the very top of Dził Yijiin (Black Mesa), AZ and she’s always been surrounded by stories. When she opens the front door of her grandma’s yellow house, she can see a coal mine. Below the mesa...

Adriana Johnson

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine
Adriana Johnson was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Art as Critique Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 1, 2019.

Adriana Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Irvine. Her first book was Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (2010). She is finishing Infrastructures of Visuality in Latin America, and planning Thinking Water, about how visual forms in Latin America materialize a knowledge of drought, rivers, rains, and sea.

Fiza Jihan

Artist working in Videography, Writing, and Sound
Fiza Jihan gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Fiza Jihan is a filmmaker whose creative work is devotional in nature, spiritually inclined and currently a reflection on grief, familial ties, migration, and friendship. Their processes inform each other and are integrated; they work with prose, videography, and sound to move through personal emotional realities and catalyze new somatic experiences for others.

Mason J.

Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist
Mason J. gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Mason J. is an Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist, inspired by life as a born raised, and displaced Black and Indigenous San Francisco Local, Sick/Disabled Queer Two-Spirit, and Land Use advocate. Their photographs, poetry, dance, and social commentary have been published in many a zine, at various festivals, all around the internet, and in print. After receiving the inaugural James C. Hormel Center Fellowship from 2017–2019...