Scholar

D.A. Powell

Poet and Professor at the University of San Francisco

Born in Albany, Georgia, D. A. Powell earned an MA at Sonoma State University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first three collections of poetry, Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004), are considered by some to be a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Lunch was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Cocktails was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His next two books were Chronic (...

Michael Pollan

Journalist and Professor of Non-Fiction at Harvard University

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers; three of them (including his latest, How to Change Your Mind) were immediate #1 New York Times bestsellers. Previous books include Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), which was...

Benjamin Piekut

Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University

Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University. His first monograph, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was...

Katie Peterson

Poet and Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at UC Davis

Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke, published by FSG in early 2024. Poems from the collection have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Yale Review, among other publications. Her previous book, Life in a Field (2021) is a collaboration with the photographer Young Suh. She is the author of other books of poetry: This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), Permission (New Issues, 2013), The Accounts (University of Chicago, 2013), and A Piece of...

Brittany Perham

Author and Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University

Brittany Perham's most recent book, Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She is also the author of The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). Her work has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the James Merrill House...

Cecilia Palmeiro

Writer, Activist, and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Latin American Studies and Gender Theory at NYU in Buenos Aires

Cecilia Palmeiro is one of the founders of the transformative Latin American feminist movement Ni Una Menos, or “Not One Woman Less,” which organizes to end femicide and gender-based violence. The Ni Una Menos collective has been supported by Global Fund for Women since 2017. She is also a writer, literary critic, performer, feminist activist, and queer feminist theorist.

Palmeiro received her MA and PhD from Princeton University -Department of Spanish and Portuguese (2009) and a repatriation postdoctoral degree from CONICET- University of Buenos Aires (2012...

Samuel Otter

Literary Critic, Professor of English at UC Berkeley

Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.

He has published Melville’s Anatomies (California, 1999), an analysis of how Melville, in his long fiction of the 1840s and 1850s,...

Daniel O’Neill

ARC Fellow, Japanese Program Associate Professor, and Head Undergraduate Academic Advisor at UC Berkeley

Associate Professor Daniel O'Neill received his B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Yale University. He teaches courses in modern Japanese literature, cinema, and cultural history. His research interests include nonfiction and experimental media, the intersections of media theory and ecocriticism, the locations of disability in critical sexuality studies and the history of science and technology. Recent publications include “Rewilding Futures” (Journal of Japanese and Korean...

Matthew Olzmann

ARC Fellow and Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth

Matthew Olzmann was born in Detroit. He received a BA from the University of Michigan–Dearborn and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the author of Constellation Route (Alice James Books, 2022); Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2016); and Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Olzmann has received fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation and Kundiman, among others. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA...

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Poet and Professor of Poetry at UC Berkeley

Poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Experience in Groups (2018), People on Sunday (2013), Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002). His work is part of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (2012), and he collaborated with poet Jeff Clark on 2A (2006).

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