Creative Writing

Patricia Smith

ARC Fellow, Poet, Spoken-Word Performer, Playwright, Author, Writing Teacher, and Former Journalist.
Patricia Smith was an ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellow in Spring 2020.

Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, includingUnshuttered (Feb 2023);Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the...

Danez Smith

ARC Fellow, Poet, Writer, and Performer
Danez Smith was an ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellow in 2020.

Danez Smith is the author of three collections including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. They have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez's poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New...

Jake Skeets

ARC Fellow, Poet, and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oklahoma
Jake Skeets was an ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellow in 2022.

Jake Skeets (he/him) is Tsi’naajínii born for Tábąąhá; his maternal grandparents are the Táchii’nii and his paternal grandparents are the Tódík’ózhí. Skeets is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. His debut collection of poetry, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, is a winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. His honors include a 2020-2021 Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the...

Maya Sisneros

Writer and Undergraduate Advisor in the UC Berkeley School of Education
Maya Sisneros gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Maya Sisnerosis a Bay Area-based writer whose poetry and fiction explore identity, intimacy, and lines of f/light. She is a recipient of the inaugural 2021 SFF/Nomadic Press Lit Award and AWP's 2021 Kurt Brown Prize for Fiction. She attended a Tin House Summer Workshop in 2021. Maya is currently at work on a novella of speculative fiction.

Kevin Simmonds

Musician and Writer
Kevin Simmonds gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in October 2021, part of the Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Kevin Simmonds is a musician and writer originally from New Orleans. He studied music at Vanderbilt University, Middle Tennessee State University and completed the Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina. He founded Tono International Arts Association, an international arts presenter in northern Japan (Iwate Prefecture).

Kevin received a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he started the first-ever poetry workshop in Changi...

Darius Simpson

Writer, Educator, and Performer
Darius Simpso gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

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...

Kim Shuck

Poet, Author, Weaver, and Bead Worker
Kim Shuck gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

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...

Tiffany Shlain

Filmmaker, Artist, and Author
Tiffany Shlain gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on April 17, 2017.

Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker(link is external), speaker,(link is external)bestselling author(link is external)...

Solmaz Sharif

Poet and Professor of English at UC Berkeley
Solmaz Sharif gave a Visiting Writer/Scholar Talk at the Arts Research Center on February 22, 2024.

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...

Susan Schweik

Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Emeritus Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley
Susan Schweik was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the City, Arts and Public Spaces Conversation at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2011.

Susan Schweik's last book was The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. She is completing a book tentatively titled Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Asylum Overturned Ideas about IQ, & Why You Don't Know About Their Work. A recipient of Berkeley's Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and U.C.'s Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education , she was involved with the...