Creative Writing

Sarah Thornton

Writer, Ethnographer, and Sociologist of Culture
Sarah Thornton was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Art of Cultural Criticism Lecture Series at the Arts Research Center on November 10, 2016. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Sarah Thornton is a sociologist who writes about art, design and people. She is the author of four critically acclaimed books. A Canadian who went to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship, Thornton was once hailed as “Britain’s hippest academic.” Now based in San Francisco, Thornton is better known as “the Jane Goodall of the art world.”...

D’mani Thomas

ARC Fellow, Writer and Creative
D'mani Thomas was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2021 & Spring 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – he was chosen in the Community Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

D’mani Thomas (he\they) is a writer, and creative from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). They are currently obsessed with surveillance and intimacy. They have received fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Art & Research Center via The Engaging the Senses Foundation, The Watering Hole, Foglifter and others. In 2023, they became a...

Alice Te Punga Somerville

Poet, Irredentist, and Department Head & Professor at the University of British Columbia
Alice Te Punga Somerville gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on March 8, 2023. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Alice Te Punga Somerville is a scholar, poet and irredentist who writes and teaches at the intersections of literary studies, Indigenous studies and Pacific studies.

Since 2022, she has been a full professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English language & literatures and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Before arriving on Musqueam...

Estelle Tarica

Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at UC Berkeley
Estelle Tarica was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant / Moderator at the Memory Paths and Fragments from the Past Talk at the Arts Research Center on March 6, 2024. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008...

Joel Tan

Playwright and Dramatist
Joel Tan was a Visiting Writer Panel Participant at the Impact in the Arts Think Tank Conference at the Arts Research Center on January 17, 2014. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website. Joel Tan is a Singaporean playwright based in London and Singapore. Recent work in the UK includes No Particular Order at Theatre503; When The Daffodils at the Orange Tree Theatre; Living Archive at the Royal Court; Ghosts in the Blood for Audible UK; Overheard, and Augmented Chinatown with...

Jennif(f)er Tamayo

ARC Fellow, Poet, Essayist, and Performer
Jenni(f)fer Tamayo was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2020 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer. Her poetry collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), YOU DA ONE (Noemi 2017) and her latest publication, TO KILL THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT (Green Lantern Press, 2018). Currently, JT lives and works on Ohlone...

Lehua M. Taitano

Poet, Interdisciplinary Artist, and Educator
Lehua M. Taitano 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.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Her chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction....

Tierra Sydnor

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Tierra Sydnor was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with University of Hawaiʻi – she was chosen in the Undergraduate Fellow Category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Tierra Sydnor (she/her) is currently earning her bachelors in French, English, and German. Her work focuses on how her experience as an African American woman and how that has affected her spiritual and life journey. The daughter of two army veterans, she spent most of her childhood in Fishers, Indiana...

Aimee Suzara

ARC Fellow, Writer, Performer, and Educator
Aimee Suzara was an ARC Fellow in Fall & Spring 2023 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.

Oakland-Based Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. As a playwright, her new work THE REAL SAPPHO was commissioned by Cutting Ball Theater and awarded by...

Robert Sullivan

Poet, Academic, and Editor
Robert Sullivan gave a Visiting Writer Workshop at the Arts Research Center on September 20, 2023. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi and Kāi Tahu) has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children, including the 2022 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i, the Montana New Zealand Book Award for co-editing Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, the Māori Literature...