Creative Writing

Vincente Perez

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Vincente Perez (He/They) is a Black Mexican-American performance poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersections of Poetry, Hip-Hop, and Digital Black cultural praxis with an interest in the way that artists use narrative to resist dominant stories that attempt to erase, subjugate, or enact violence on marginalized communities. Their work centers Black and Latinx lived experience with a stylistic approach that samples and (re)mixes Hip-Hop and Performance Poetry into counternarratives. He is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program (Department of Theater,...

Beth Piatote

ARC Director, 2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry and the Senses
Beth Piatote Director, Arts Research Center


Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English

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...

Jesse Nathan

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Jesse Nathan’s poems appear in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, FENCE, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. His translations of Alfonsina Storni and Brenda Solís-Fong in Mantis and Poetry International. Nathan was born in Berkeley, where he lived until he was ten; he spent the second half of his childhood on a wheat farm in rural Kansas. Nathan moved to San Francisco after college, in part to take a position at McSweeney’s. His work has been supported by 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...

Cristina S. Méndez

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Cristina Méndez (she/her/ella) is a Chicana writer and educator born and raised in the Bay Area (Muwekma Ohlone territory). Through her ongoing work alongside Maya Mam activists on projects of language revitalization, she explores the continuum of how people understand and support each other across lines of difference. Cristina is interested in coalitions, tensions, transformational learning, and healing as she envisions other futurities in the present.

Cristina was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the...

Sara Mumolo

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Sara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter and Mortar, both published by Omnidawn. She serves as the Associate Director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA. Writing has appeared in Lana Turner, ...

Gracia Mwamba

2020 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Gracia Mwamba is a visual artist, composer and writer from DRCongo, by way of South Africa. Currently in her final year of a BA in Art Practice, Gracia works interdisciplinarily to communicate through her work. Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue credentials to become a licensed Art Therapist and strong advocate for art as an accessible means of healing and social change.

Gracia was an ARC Fellow in Spring & Fall 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – they were chosen in the Undergraduate Student Fellow category.

Rusty Morrison

2020 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Rusty Morrison is the author of Risk, which will be published by Black Ocean in Spring 2024. Her other books include After Urgency (which won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize) and the true keeps calm biding its story (which won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, James Laughlin Award, N.California Book Award, & DiCastagnola Award). Her poems have been recently published in APR, Fence, and other journals. She is the co-publisher of Omnidawn. She teaches and gives writing consultations.

Rusty was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2020 with the...

Anastasia Le

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

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 the counter at Eastwind Books of Berkeley planning their next open mic.

Anastasia was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the...

Gisselle Medina

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses

Gisselle Medina’s identity consists of multitudes—a Latine, queer, non-binary from Los Angeles. They are a poet, visual artist and journalist in their final year as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. In Medina’s scholarship, they investigate the history of literature and intertwine various methods and theories into literary and cultural analysis. In their poetry, Medina writes fiercely about their restless past and our collective world, in hopes to inspire and transcend anyone willing to listen. Medina inspires to be an investigative reporter for...