Creative Writing

Taté Walker

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Taté Walker was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with Arizona State University – they were chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Taté Walker (they/them) is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller. Their first full-length poetry book, “The Trickster Riots,” was published in 2022, by Abalone Mountain Press. Taté, a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, has written, photographed, and/or edited for various outlets, including The Nation, Yellow Medicine...

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Angel Sobotta

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Angel Sobotta was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with luk’upsíimey – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Angel Sobotta is an enrolled member of the Nez Perce Tribe. She has worked for the Nez Perce Language since 1998, serving as a coordinator and teaching language at Lapwai schools, the mamayá’snim hitéemenwees – Children’s Learning place, Kamiah and Clearwater Valley schools, Northwest Indian College, Lewis-Clark State College, the University of Idaho, and Washington State University. Sobotta’s...

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Dr. Ines Hernandez-Avila

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Professor Hernandez-Avila was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with luk’upsíimey – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Professor Hernandez-Avila is Niimiipuu/Nez Perce, of Chief Joseph’s band, enrolled on the Colville Reservation, Washington, on her mother’s side, and Tejana (and Mexican Indigenous) on her father’s side. A scholar, poet, and visual artist, her research and teaching focus on contemporary Indigenous literature of the Americas, and Indigenous religious traditions. She is a Ford...

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Maura Adela Cruz

2023/24 ARC Fellow - Indigenous Poetics Lab

Maura Adela Cruz was the 2023-2024 ARC Indigenous Poetics Lab Fellow.

Maura Adela Cruz (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley pursuing a degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing. She was raised in California’s Central Valley to an Indigenous farmworker community and is of Zapotec and Mixtec descent. Maura’s poetry focuses on Zapotec language revitalization while also examining the circumstances imposed by settler-colonial nation-states like the U.S. and Mexico. Her poetic work seeks to document and preserve the...

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Julian Ankney

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Julian Ankney was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with luk’upsíimey – she was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Julian Ankney is Niimíipuu ‘Nez Perce’ and lives on both the Nez Perce Reservation in Lapwai, Idaho and Portland, Oregon. Ankney is the Director for Native American Programs, co-director of the Visiting Writers Series, and co-fiction editor for Blood Orange Review at Washington State University Vancouver/Pullman. She teaches Native American and multicultural literature,...

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Claire Hong

Visiting Writer

Claire Hong gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on March 2, 2023.

Claire Hong is the author of Upend (Noemi Press), which was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award. She received a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University (2019-2021) and has creative writing degrees from the University of Arizona (MFA) and Pratt Institute (BFA). She was born in San Francisco, CA and currently lives in Tucson, AZ where she works to distribute traditional, arid adapted seeds.

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Cody Achin

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses

Cody Achin was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with Arizona State University – he was chosen in the Community Fellow category.

Cody Achin is half Native American. Half Anglo and half O’odham. Currently residing within his ancestral and childhood home within the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Reservation in Arizona. Achin recently graduated from Arizona State University in Spring 2023 with a Bachelor’s in English with a focus on Poetry. Achin’s poetry is tied heavily to his cultural background and his...