Creative Writing

Adriana Johnson

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine
Adriana Johnson was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Art as Critique Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 1, 2019. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Adriana Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Irvine. Her first book was Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (2010). She is finishing Infrastructures of Visuality in Latin America, and planning Thinking Water, about how visual forms in Latin America materialize a knowledge of...

Mason J.

Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist
Mason J. 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.

Mason J. is an Artist, Oral Historian, and Activist, inspired by life as a born raised, and displaced Black and Indigenous San Francisco Local, Sick/Disabled Queer Two-Spirit, and Land Use advocate. Their photographs, poetry, dance, and social commentary have been published in many a zine, at various festivals, all around the internet, and in...

Ra Malika Imhotep

Black Feminist Writer, Performance Artist, and PhD Candidate of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley
Ra Malika Imhotep 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.

Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Their academic and creative work tends the relationships between Black femininity, Southern vernacular aesthetics...

Amanda Galvan Huynh

2023 ARC Fellow - Poetry & the Senses
Amanda Galvan Huynh was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with University of Hawaiʻiy – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her) is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author Where My Umbilical is Buried (Sundress Publications 2023), a chapbook Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks September 2019), and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays...

Rina Huang

2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate
Rina Huang 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.

Rina Huang is still a half-child, teetering on the brink of adulthood. She is co-editor of The Steele in which she also publishes frequently. A soon-to-be graduate of the College Preparatory School in Oakland, as well as a soon-to-be-freshman at Amherst College, she finds herself at the constant cruz of exploration, of newness. She is an alumnus of the...

Hua Hsu

Staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of English at Bard College
Hua Hsu gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on October 17, 2016. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the memoir Stay True (September 2022). He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. Hsu is a contributor to CBS News’s...

Jane Hirshfield

Poet, Essayist, and Translator
Jane Hirshfield gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City on February 24, 1953. A poet, translator, essayist, and editor, she received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Hirshfield’s books of poetry include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Alfred A....

Jack Hirschman

Poet, Social Activist, Former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, and Founder of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival
Jack Hirschman gave a Visiting Writer Reading and Talk at the Arts Research Center on February 8, 2017. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Jack Hirschman was born in New York, New York. A proponent of the Beat Generation, he earned degrees from the City College of New York (CCNY) and Indiana University.

A poet and translator, Hirschman is the author of numerous books of poetry including, All That’s Left (City Lights Books, 2008) and The Arcanes (Multimedia, 2006). The former poet laureate of San...

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

2019 ARC Fellow
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer and healer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. Her practice serves as a bridge,...

Brenda Hillman

Poet, Editor, Translator, and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at St. Mary's College
Brenda Hillman gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series. If you are interested in contacting this artist, please find them on their website.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of eleven full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Seasonal...