Creative Writing

Dana Koster

Poet and Photographer
Dana Koster gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in October 2021, part of the Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Dana Koster was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Ventura, California. She earned her English degree from UC Berkeley and MFA in poetry from Cornell University. From 2011-2013, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two children, where she works as a...

Ava Koohbor

Poet, Visual, and Sound Artist
Ava Koohbor gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website. Ava Koohbor is a native Farsi-speaker poet and visual artist who now lives in San Francisco. Many of her poems have been appeared in various magazines. Her chapbook, Triangle Squared...

Fede Kong-Gonzalez

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Fede Kong-Gonzalez was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – they were chosen in the Undergraduate Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge...

Alexandra Kleeman

ARC Fellow, Writer, and Assistant Professor of Writing at the New School
Alexandra Kleeman was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2010 – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novel Something New Under the Sun, Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in...

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. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...

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. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...

Kealoha

Hawaiʻi's First Poet Laureate Emeritus
Kealoha gave a Visiting Writer Talk and Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...

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. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Spoken Word Artist, Writer, Librettist, and Cultural Strategist
Marc Bamuthi Joseph was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Situated: A Rite to Heal Symposium at the Arts Research Center on October 10, 2011. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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,...

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. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...