Creative Writing

Tourmaline

Artist, Filmmaker, Activist, Editor, and Writer
Tourmaline gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on March 5, 2020.

Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible.

Tourmaline lives and works in...

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.

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.”

Thornton’s latest book Tits Up explores the universal truths of mammary...

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.

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 territory, Te Punga Somerville previously taught at universities in Australia, Hawai’i...

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.

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), concerning the discourse of indigenismo and mestizaje in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia...

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. 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 Chinese Arts Now. He is under commission with the Royal Court, Headlong Theatre, and the...

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.

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 and Patwin lands and is pursuing her PhD in Performance Studies at the University of...

Anne Walsh

2011 & 2019 ARC Fellow
Anne Walsh was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2011 & Spring 2019 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Anne Walsh is a maker of performance, video, sound, and text works, many of which re-mediate the works and lives of other artists and her own family. Walsh’s book Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh (2019, no place press/MIT Press) epitomizes the aggressively indexical, personal, and analytical nature of her practice: it is a visual and written ‘adaptation’ of Leonora Carrington’s 1950 fantastical feminist novella The Hearing Trumpet. Other recent...

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.

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. She has two chapbooks of poetry and visual art: Sonoma and Capacity...

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.

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. She has a strong passion for religious tolerance and cross-community cooperation....

Robert Sullivan

Poet, Academic, and Editor
Robert Sullivan gave a Visiting Writer Workshop at the Arts Research Center on September 20, 2023.

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 Award for co-editing Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English, and...