Creative Writing

Ayodele Nzinga

Actress, Director, Playwright, Poet, Dramaturg, Performance Consultant, Educator, Community Advocate, and the Director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc
Ayodele Nzinga gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Ayodele Nzinga is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. She is co-...

Bradford Nordeen

Writer, Curator and the Founder of Dirty Looks Inc
Bradford Nordeen gave a Visiting Artist Talk/Screening at the Arts Research Center on April 25, 2019. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Bradford Nordeen is a writer, curator and the founder of Dirty Looks Inc. His books include Because Horror (with Johnny Ray Huston), Check Your Vernacular, Dirty Looks at MoMA, Fever Pitch, the Dirty Looks Volume I-IVseries (editor), and the forthcoming novel, Blessed Western. His writing is anthologized in...

Maggie Nelson

Writer and Professor of English at the University of Southern California
Maggie Nelson gave a Visiting Writer Lecture/Conversation at the Arts Research Center on January 30, 2017. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Poet, scholar, and nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson earned a PhD in English literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work is often described as genre crossing or hybrid; she has noted her interest in poet Eileen Myles’s idea of “vernacular scholarship,” adding, “I need to talk back, or talk with,...

Jesse Nathan

2021/22 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Jesse Nathan was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...

Ramona Naddaff

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Ramona Naddaff was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2021 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

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...

Christian Nagler

ARC Fellow, Performer, Writer, and Translator
Christian Nagler was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2017 – he was chosen in the Graduate category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Christian Nagler is a performer, writer and translator. His work looks at (and performs) the imbrications of embodiment and global economics both in his everyday life and in projects like Market Fitness, and...

Zouhair Mussa

Community organizer and Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Zouhair Mussa 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.

Zouhair Mussa is a Sudanese/Nubian-American community organizer and multi-disciplinary artist from West Oakland. His art is based on the life he has lived and aims at addressing that which is detrimental to him and his community. He seeks to shed light on injustices that plague the places he calls home. He uses his art to remember the fallen and dreams...

Sara Mumolo

2021 ARC Fellow – Poetry & the Senses
Sara Mumolo was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2021 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.

Sara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter and Mortar, both published by Omnidawn. She serves as the Associate Director for the MFA...

Rusty Morrison

2020 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Rusty Morrison was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 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.

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...

Benjamin Morgan

ARC Fellow and Associate Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago
Benjamin Morgan was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2009 – he was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Benjamin Morgan's first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion generated new and controversial explanations of the human experience of the arts. The book reflects on the long history of using evolutionary theory and cognitive science to make...