Creative Writing

Ra Malika Imhotep

Black Feminist Writer, Performance Artist, and PhD Candidate of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley
Ra Malika Imhotep gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Their academic and creative work tends the relationships between Black femininity, Southern vernacular aesthetics, and the performance of labor. They are a co-convener of the embodied spiritual-...

Amanda Galvan Huynh

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Amanda Galvan Huynh was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with University of Hawaiʻiy – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.

Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her) is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author Where My Umbilical is Buried (Sundress Publications 2023), a chapbook Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks September 2019), and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019). Amanda has been...

Rina Huang

2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate
Rina Huang gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Rina Huang is still a half-child, teetering on the brink of adulthood. She is co-editor of The Steele in which she also publishes frequently. A soon-to-be graduate of the College Preparatory School in Oakland, as well as a soon-to-be-freshman at Amherst College, she finds herself at the constant cruz of exploration, of newness. She is an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and the California...

Hua Hsu

Staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of English at Bard College
Hua Hsu gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 17, 2016.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the memoir Stay True (September 2022). He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. Hsu is a contributor to CBS News’s Sunday Morning; serves on the governance board of Critical...

Jane Hirshfield

Poet, Essayist, and Translator
Jane Hirshfield gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. A poet, translator, essayist, and editor, she received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Hirshfield’s books of poetry include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023); Ledger...

Jack Hirschman

Poet, Social Activist, Former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, and Founder of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival
Jack Hirschman gave a Visiting Writer Reading and Talk at the Arts Research Center on February 8, 2017.

Jack Hirschman was born in New York, New York. A proponent of the Beat Generation, he earned degrees from the City College of New York (CCNY) and Indiana University.

A poet and translator, Hirschman is the author of numerous books of poetry including, All That’s Left (City Lights Books, 2008) and The Arcanes (Multimedia, 2006). The former poet laureate of San Francisco and founder of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, Hirschman...

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

2019 ARC Fellow
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer and healer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. Her practice serves as a bridge, merging the intersections of art, activism, spirituality and healing as tools for...

Brenda Hillman

Poet, Editor, Translator, and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at St. Mary's College
Brenda Hillman gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of eleven full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International...

Lee Herrick

California Poet Laureate
Lee Herrick gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center on April 20, 2023.

Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire.

He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020). His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us:...

Leticia Hernández-Linares

Spring 2023 Flash Reader, Writer, Artist, and Professor of Ethnic Studies at SF State
Leticia Hernández-Linares gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.

Leticia Hernández-Linares is a bilingual, interdisciplinary, award winning, writer, artist, and racial justice educator. The first-generation U.S. born daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, she is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl & Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandria! Widely published, she is the co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States and...