Let us poem a place where
you cannot erase us into white space.
– TANAYA WINDER
Should I cry out and see what happens?
– Frank O’Hara
Fall 2023 Fellows
UC Berkeley, Arizona State University, and luk’upsíimey
Cody Achin
Community Fellow, Arizona
Fall 2023
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 native language. By infusing words/phrases within his native language in his poetry, Achin is looking to create an introspective look into how he walks in two worlds. One in traditionalism and the other in modernism. Achin’s poetry mixes with his natural surroundings and has an influenced structure to breathe life into each poem.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Julian Ankney
Community Fellow, luk’upsíimey
Fall 2023
Julian Ankney Julian C. 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, creative writing, and has co-taught a language revitalization class that focuses on reclamation, revitalization, and the importance of Nez Perce language and culture. Ankney is a voice on The Old Mole at Portland’s KBOO radio, and she was featured in Berkeley Hearst Museum’s online exhibit, Cloth that Stretches: Weaving Community Across Time and Space. Her work is published in Talking River, Yellow Medicine Review, and EcoArts on the Palouse. Lastly, Ankney is a member of luk’upsíimey, The North Star Collective (an Indigenous Plateau literary advocacy group).
Al-An deSouza
Faculty Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Al-An deSouza works across photo-media, installation, text and performance works as staging grounds for historical memory and its legacies upon the present. Their works draw upon formal and informal archives, remaking them through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY, Krannert Museum, IL; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Mori Museum, Tokyo. deSouza has published numerous essays and two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought, A Handbook for Change (2018), and Ark of Martyrs (2020), a polyphonic, dysphoric replacement of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness.
Dr. Ines Hernandez-Avila
Community Fellow, luk’upsíimey
Fall 2023
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 Foundation Fellow at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, and a member of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows. She is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She received the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award for her work mentoring graduate students (2009), and she also received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the Consortium for Research on Women.
Chris Hoshnic
Undergraduate Fellow, Arizona State University
Fall 2023
Chris Hoshnic is Diné from Sweetwater, Arizona. He is currently earning his B.A. in English at Arizona State University. In 2013, he graduated with an Associates in Video Production at Glendale Community College. His short film “Ozzy” premiered at the 2018 Jerome International
Film Festival. He was a finalist in screenplay competitions at Austin Micro Film Festival, Phoenix Film Festival and Shore Scripts. In 2022, he was a Writing Fellow with the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute (EDWI). He was a Special Projects Intern for Thousand Languages Project and will translate work from Hayden’s Ferry Review this Fall. In the summer of 2023, Chris was a fellow of the Native American Media Alliance’s Writers
Seminar and will be a Fall 2023 Teaching Artist at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Writing.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Fede Kong-Gonzalez
Undergraduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge from a project having pulled out something they could never quite grab at before. Fede loves love, being undone, and a good string. For the new year they plan to do a bird watching Big Year, learn balance, and be in conversation.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Marisa Lin
Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Marisa Lin is a daughter of Chinese immigrants and Minnesota native. Her first training in poetry was through western classical music. A 2023 Roots Wounds Words Poetry Fellow, Marisa is an alum of the VONA, Kenyon Review, and Community of Writers workshops. You can find her work at Poetry South, Porter House Review, The Racket, and elsewhere. She is pursuing a Master’s Degree of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and in her free time enjoys hiking, petting cats, and writing random letters to friends.
Image by Clara Pérez
Cristina S. Méndez
Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Cristina Méndez (she/her/ella) is a Chicana writer and educator born and raised in the Bay Area (Muwekma Ohlone territory). Through her ongoing work alongside Maya Mam activists on projects of language revitalization, she explores the continuum of how people understand and support each other across lines of difference. Cristina is interested in coalitions, tensions, transformational learning, and healing as she envisions other futurities in the present.
Angel Sobotta
Community Fellow, luk’upsíimey
Fall 2023
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 research is Titwáatit, Nimipuutímt, Wéetes: Ceptemelíxnikt Nimipuuwíitki kaa Cukwenéewit – The Stories, Niimíipuu Language, Land: Investigating the Nez Perce People’s Way of Thinking and Knowing. She is a member of Luk’upsíimey – NorthStar Collective, which revitalizes language creatively through writing. She has publications in Nez Perce Women’s Writers Institute Anthology NPWWI (2018), Yellow Medicine Review (2020), and a chapbook with Luk’upsíimey: The North Star Collective (2022).
Aimee Suzara
Community Fellow, Oakland
Spring & Fall 2023
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 the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works fund and National Endowment for the Arts, and TINY FIRES will have its World Premiere in 2023. Her poetry book SOUVENIR (2014) was a Willa Award Finalist, and her poems appear in poets.org, numerous journals and anthologies such as Kartika Review, 580 Split, Lantern Review, and two Lockhorn Press anthologies.
Image by Bethanie Hines
Taté Walker
Community Fellow, Arizona
Fall 2023
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 Review, Pipe Wrench, Apartment Therapy, Everyday Feminism, Native Peoples, Indian Country Today, Subaru Drive, December, and ANMLY. Taté has 20 years of experience in print/digital journalism and advocacy writing, and is a trusted community builder within/for social justice and tribal education spaces.
Image credit: Tania Pleitez
Sa Whitley
Faculty Fellow, Arizona State University
Fall 2023
Sa Whitley (they/them/theirs) is a black queer poet and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Transformation at Arizona State University. They received their Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Whitley has received poetry fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference (‘22), Cave Canem, and the Community of Writers. They have published poems in POETRY Magazine and scholarship in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ). Whitley’s academic scholarship examines housing and economic justice models and intentional communities designed by black queer and transgender women during and after financial crises. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, Whitley enjoys science fiction, night swims, and dancing to 80’s electro-funk music.
Twitter: @sa_lidarity
Image credit: Samantha Allen
Ayling Zulema Dominguez
Graduate Fellow, Arizona State University
Fall 2023
Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator rooted in a poetics of anticolonial imagination. Their art and poetry ask who we are at our most free and what it might take to arrive there. Lyricality and reclamation of historically silenced voices and experiences inform their writing and artistry, as does abundance and collective care. They were a 2023 Prufer Poetry Prize Finalist, and received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. They are an active mentee in the Latinx in Publishing Writers Mentorship Program. Select poems of theirs have been published in The Seventh Wave, No, Dear Magazine, Moko Magazine, Alegria Magazine’s Latinx Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. Their peoples are from Mexico and Dominican Republic. Ayling is currently pursuing an MFA at ASU. Ultimately, they believe in poetry as a tool for liberation.
Spring 2023 Fellows
Carol Ann Carl
Community Fellow, University of Hawaiʻi
Spring 2023
Carol Ann Carl is a daughter of the island of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia. In 2020, she earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. Storytelling and writing are personal forms of pedagogical healing. Professionally and creatively, Carol Ann leans into the intersectionality of her identity – indigeneity, science, health, and civic advocacy – to develop narratives of empowerment for the Micronesian community in Hawaiʻi and the wider Pacific Islander community abroad. Currently, Carol Ann is a Research Associate with the Māpuna Lab at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where her work centers cultural reclamation as disaster response. As a storyteller, her collective work KEWERIWER explores the social context of her life and her life as a transformer of that social context. Her poetry has been featured in the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Celebrate Micronesia Festival, and the Why It Matters civic engagement docuseries for the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities.
Phillip Cash Cash
Community Fellow, luk’upsíimey
Spring 2023
Phillip Cash Cash is a niimíipuu (Nez Perce)/weyíiletpuu (Cayuse) human, an award winning Indigenous scholar, artist, writer, and traditional healer. He is a younger speaker of nimiipuutímt, the Nez Perce language, a severely endangered language. Cash Cash holds doctoral degrees in linguistics and anthropology. His creativity and inquiry are life-centered endeavors committed to cultural revitalization and community-based language advocacy. He sees our Native languages as vital elements of epistemology, consciousness, and spirit that connects us to Indigenous lives, lands, ancestors, and futurity. Philosophy: “the earth and myself of one mind,” Young Chief Joseph, Nez Perce (1840-1904). Dr. Cash Cash is also a co-founder of Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (a nationally recognized Indigenous arts press and institute) and luk’upsíimey, The North Star Collective (an Indigenous Plateau literary advocacy group).
Al-An deSouza
Faculty Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Al-An deSouza works across photo-media, installation, text and performance works as staging grounds for historical memory and its legacies upon the present. Their works draw upon formal and informal archives, remaking them through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY, Krannert Museum, IL; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Mori Museum, Tokyo. deSouza has published numerous essays and two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought, A Handbook for Change (2018), and Ark of Martyrs (2020), a polyphonic, dysphoric replacement of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness.
Amanda Galvan Huynh
Graduate Fellow, University of Hawaiʻi
Spring 2023
Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her) is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks 2019) and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019). Her debut poetry collection, Where My Umbilical is Buried, is forthcoming in 2023 with Sundress Publications.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Sarah Hennessey
Community Fellow, luk’upsíimey
Spring 2023
Sarah Hennessey is Nimíipuu and she is a poet, performer, playwright, and youth empowerment theater practitioner. Her work highlights the symbiosis of storytelling and language reclamation. By integrating her penchant for literature and performance into her educational outreach, Sarah infuses her instruction with not just interdisciplinary pedagogy, but also both traditional and contemporary storytelling techniques. Her work has been published in literary journals such as Yellow Medicine Review and Pork Belly Press. Her first short play Weet’u Naqaacnim ‘iceyeeye’ (Not My Grandmother’s Coyote) was featured in Lewis-Clark State College’s Humanifest in Spring of 2021.
Fede Kong-Gonzalez
Undergraduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge from a project having pulled out something they could never quite grab at before. Fede loves love, being undone, and a good string. For the new year they plan to do a bird watching Big Year, learn balance, and be in conversation.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Marisa Lin
Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Marisa Lin is a daughter of Chinese immigrants and Minnesota native. Her first training in poetry was through western classical music. A 2023 Roots Wounds Words Poetry Fellow, Marisa is an alum of the VONA, Kenyon Review, and Community of Writers workshops. You can find her work at Poetry South, Porter House Review, The Racket, and elsewhere. She is pursuing a Master’s Degree of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and in her free time enjoys hiking, petting cats, and writing random letters to friends.
Image by Clara Pérez
Cristina S. Méndez
Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
Spring & Fall 2023
Cristina Méndez (she/her/ella) is a Chicana writer and educator born and raised in the Bay Area (Muwekma Ohlone territory). Through her ongoing work alongside Maya Mam activists on projects of language revitalization, she explores the continuum of how people understand and support each other across lines of difference. Cristina is interested in coalitions, tensions, transformational learning, and healing as she envisions other futurities in the present.
Noʻu Revilla
Faculty Fellow, University of Hawaiʻi
Spring 2023
Noʻu Revilla (she / her / ʻo ia) is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022) won the 2021 National Poetry Series. She is a lifetime student of Haunani-Kay Trask and prioritizes collaboration, movement, and gratitude in her practice.
Aimee Suzara
Community Fellow, Oakland
Spring & Fall 2023
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 the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works fund and National Endowment for the Arts, and TINY FIRES will have its World Premiere in 2023. Her poetry book SOUVENIR (2014) was a Willa Award Finalist, and her poems appear in poets.org, numerous journals and anthologies such as Kartika Review, 580 Split, Lantern Review, and two Lockhorn Press anthologies.
Image by Bethanie Hines
Tierra Sydnor
Undergraduate Fellow, University of Hawaiʻi
Spring 2023
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. Tierra in her free time hoards books and watches Golden Girls.
Kellen Trenal
Community Fellow, luk’upsíimey
Spring 2023
Kellen Trenal (pronounced like “Chanel”) is a visual artist, performer, small business owner, alumnus of the University of Notre Dame, and holistic wellness enthusiast, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Proudly representing both African (Black American) and niimíipuu (Nez Perce) ancestry, Kellen embraces these multiple identities to empower their work in all its manifestations. Kellen shares (he)artwork through Trenal Original, a traditional-arts based, 2SLGBTQ+/BIPOC-owned, small business. Kellen utilizes a wealth of Indigenous knowledge to explore the tradition of continual innovation. The works range from hand-crafted accessories and jewelry design, gallery art, traditional niimíipuu regalia, modern apparel, to much more.
Fall 2021/Spring 2022
Undergraduate Student Fellows:
Gisselle Medina
Gisselle Medina’s identity consists of multitudes—a Latine, queer, non-binary from Los Angeles. They are a poet, visual artist and journalist in their final year as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. In Medina’s scholarship, they investigate the history of literature and intertwine various methods and theories into literary and cultural analysis. In their poetry, Medina writes fiercely about their restless past and our collective world, in hopes to inspire and transcend anyone willing to listen. Medina inspires to be an investigative reporter for the LA Times, a multi-published poet and founder of a non-profit organization for mental health. This is only the beginning of their journey.
Anastasia DoanTrinh Le
Anastasia DoanTrinh Le is a poet and printmaker from the Lake Chabot area of the East Bay. Her work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review’s Midterm Five: Interlace/Intersect, the 2021 Southeast Asian Student Coalition anthology, and on the walls of her former co-op. She approaches poetry with a Vietnamese linguistic sensibility, but writes in English—she’s working on that. You can find her behind the counter at Eastwind Books of Berkeley planning their next open mic.
Graduate Student Fellows:
최 Lindsay | Lindsay Choi
최 Lindsay is a poet and translator working between English, Korean, and Swedish. They are the author of Transverse (Futurepoem, 2021), as well as a chapbook, Matrices (speCt! books, 2017). More of their work can be found in Omniverse, Aster(ix) Journal, and elsewhere, including a forthcoming sound piece for amatter. They are a Kundiman fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at UC Berkeley. With Noah Ross, they are a founding co-editor of the chapbook press MO(0)ON/IO. Their work has been translated to French, and appears in NIOQUES, 22/23: Nouvelle Poésie Des États-Unis (New U.S. Poetry), edited by DoubleChange Collective, and translated by Abigail Lang. Visit them at lindsaychoi.com.
Vincente Perez
Vincente Perez (He/They) is a Black Mexican-American performance poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersections of Poetry, Hip-Hop, and Digital Black cultural praxis with an interest in the way that artists use narrative to resist dominant stories that attempt to erase, subjugate, or enact violence on marginalized communities. Their work centers Black and Latinx lived experience with a stylistic approach that samples and (re)mixes Hip-Hop and Performance Poetry into counternarratives. He is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program (Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies)
Faculty Fellows:
Ahmad Diab
Ahmad Diab is a Palestinian writer and academic. He is assistant professor of modern Arabic literature and cinema (20th and 21st centuries) at University of California, Berkeley. His work contemplates the relationship between displacement and representation. He received his B.A. from Damascus University. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is currently finishing his first academic book titled Intimate Others: Representations of Arabs in the Palestinian Imaginary. He is also finishing his Arabic translation of After the Last Sky by Edward Said, and compiling a volume of poetry provisionally titled Measures of Distance.
Jesse Nathan
Jesse Nathan’s poems appear in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, FENCE, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. His translations of Alfonsina Storni and Brenda Solís-Fong in Mantis and Poetry International. Nathan was born in Berkeley, where he lived until he was ten; he spent the second half of his childhood on a wheat farm in rural Kansas. Nathan moved to San Francisco after college, in part to take a position at McSweeney’s. His work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ashbery Home School, Bread Loaf, and the Community of Writers. He lives now in Oakland and is a lecturer in the English Department at UC Berkeley.
Community Fellows:
Maurya Kerr
Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, including Inverted Syntax, Chestnut Review, Tupelo Quarterly, little somethings press, and an anthology, “The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.” Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on Black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to wonderment. Maurya was recently chosen by Jericho Brown as a runner-up in Southern Humanities Review’s 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and her first chapbook, MUTTOLOGY, will be published with Harbor Editions in 2022. Image by Kimara Dixon.
D’mani Thomas
D’mani Thomas is a Black visual theorist, horror enthusiast, and writer from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). D’mani has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Foglifter literary journal, and Bakanal de Afrique via Afro Urban Society. When he’s not writing, find him watching horror movie trailers, drinking smoothies, or reading YouTube spoilers for movies he has no attention span for. D’mani’s work has been published by The Auburn Avenue, The Ana, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Shade Literary Arts, and his poem, “Survival Tactics” was recently shortlisted for the 2020 Penrose Poetry Prize. His current work obsesses over what it means to create intimacy under total surveillance.
Spring 2021
Undergraduate Student Fellows:
Vethea Cerna Cole
Vethea Cerna Cole is a queer, Filipinx writer, artist, and lover in their final year of pursuing a BA in Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research analyzes the intergenerational trauma passed between mothers who have emigrated from the Philippines and queer, trans, first generation children adapting to life in the settler colony that is the U.S. Centering decolonization in their art and scholarship, Vethea hopes to contribute to new frameworks of healing and restorative justice for QTBIPOC. To them, sharing community, language, and vulnerability is at the heart of everything.
Made Here:
Mirrors | Poetry Reading Video
Elizabeth Zhiying Feng
Elizabeth Zhiying Feng is a visual artist, writer, and programmer from the Bay Area. Elizabeth is a second year Electrical Engineering & Computer Science major at Berkeley. She creates visual poetry that combines writing with elements of photography, typography, cinematography, and composition. She’s also interested in new media, immersive computing, and machine creativity, and hopes to discover new ways to combine art and technology in the future.
Made Here:
Polo Horses | Poetry Reading Video
Graduate Student Fellows:
reelaviolette botts-ward
reelaviolette botts-ward is a homegirl, an educator, and a nontraditional multimedia artist from Philadelphia, PA. She is currently a doctoral candidate in African Diaspora Studies researching Black women’s healing spaces in Oakland. ree centers “everyday round the way Blackgirl methodology” to theorize creative innovation in the wake of displacement. Founder of blackwomxnhealing, ree curates healing circles and exhibitions for and by Black womxn, using Black feminist poetics and artistry as tools for translation between academic and community audiences. Her first book, mourning my inner[blackgirl]child, will be published with Nomadic Press in 2021 (info here).
blackwomxnhealing.com / @blackwomxnhealing.
Made Here:
sanctified children | A Reading of sanctified children
Noah Warren
Noah Warren is the author of The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon, 2021) and The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale, 2016). His honors include the Yale Series of Younger Poets and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and his poems appear in The Paris Review, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. At Berkeley, his research traces the pervasive influence of natural history and its classificatory logic in nineteenth century America, investigating how these structure practices of observation, encourage anti-progressivism, and subtend the nefarious racism of American ethnography.
Made Here:
Emergency | A Reading of Talk
Faculty Fellows:
Ramona Naddaff
Ramona Naddaff is the author of a collection of prose-poems, Paris/Paris (Tête d’Affiche, 1991) and of a permanent installation of a poem-collage, “Ancient Greece and Democracy” in the Lisbon metro station. She has written a scholarly monograph, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic (University of Chicago, 2002) as well as essays on ancient Greek philosophy and literature, and on literary censorship. She is currently completing a manuscript on the writing practices of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, Never Alone: The Making of Madame Bovary. Associate Professor in the Rhetoric Department, Naddaff is also founding director of the Art of Writing program at the Doreen B.Townsend Humanities Center. She has been an editor at Zone Books in New York since its inception.
Made Here:
Da capo al fine | A Reading of Petty Pandemic
Ken Ueno
Rome Prize and Berlin Prize winner Ken Ueno is a composer, vocalist and sound artist. Ueno’s collaborators include the Hilliard Ensemble, Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Steve Schick and SFCMP, and Frances-Marie Uitti. As a vocalist, he has performed his concerto with orchestras in Boston, New York, Poland, Lithuania, Thailand, North Carolina, and California. His sound installations have been installed at MUAC, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Art Basel, and at SCI-Arc. Ueno is currently a Professor in Music at UC Berkeley. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.
Made Here:
Non-time and Decolonizing Affordances of Failure | A Reading of Shadowless Sun
Community Fellows:
Sara Mumolo
Sara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter and Mortar, both published by Omnidawn. She serves as the Associate Director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA. Writing has appeared in Lana Turner, The Millions, PEN Poetry Series, Pleiades, San Francisco Chronicle, and Zyzzyva, among others. She created and curated the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland, CA from 2007-2012. She has received residencies to Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Center for the Arts, and has served as a curatorial resident at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, CA.
Made Here:
Making Trauma Notes | A Reading of Trauma Note
Maw Shein Win
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018), and her full-length poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was recently longlisted for a 2021 PEN Open Book Award. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers.
Made Here:
Thought Log #15, 16, 17 | A Reading of Fires
2020
Undergraduate Student Fellows:
Menat Allah El Attma
Menat Allah El Attma is an Egyptian Muslim woman, educator, writer, and visual artist. Menat graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in English literature and is pursuing her teaching credential. She is a logophile and linguaphile, working to affect a similar love for words/languages in her students through the practice and art of storytelling. She believes art is in the telling of the story as much as the story itself.
Made Here:
Sensing, Knowing, and Other Matters
Gracia Mwamba
Gracia Mwamba is a visual artist, composer and writer from DRCongo, by way of South Africa. Currently in her final year of a BA in Art Practice, Gracia works interdisciplinarily to communicate through her work. Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue credentials to become a licensed Art Therapist and strong advocate for art as an accessible means of healing and social change.
Made Here:
To You: In the tradition of izibongo (south-african praise prose)
Graduate Student Fellows:
Jared Robinson
Jared Robinson is from Indianapolis, IN. He is a poet and scholar in the UC Berkeley English department. In his scholarship, he interrogates the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and Enlightenment philosophy through careful attention to early African-American literature and its reception. In his poetry, he attempts an understanding of everything else. He does not care for this California weather. He is glad to greet you.
Made Here:
The First Day of the Plague Was My Birthday | Poetry Reading Video
Jenif(f)er Tamayo
Jenif(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 California Berkeley. Her research explores how contemporary Black and Indigenous poets use vocal practices to counternarrate histories of colonial violence.
Made Here:
Poetry, Voice & Violence | What If Every
Faculty Fellows:
Beth Piatote
Beth Piatote is author of two books: a mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019); and a scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), as well as numerous essays and short stories stories in journals and anthologies. Her recent work, The Beadworkers, has been long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize. She is currently associate professor of Native American Studies, where she specializes in Native American literature and law; Nez Perce language and literature; Indigenous Language Revitalization; and creative writing. She earned a PhD from Stanford University.
Made Here:
kawá/then | I cause my heart to pour out is how to say remember
Alex Saum-Pascual
Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet and professor. She is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture (20th and 21st Centuries) and Electronic Literature (Digital Humanities). She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her academic work on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world has been published in Spain, Mexico and the United States. Her digital artwork and poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Norway and the UK.
Made Here:
Room 1 and Room 2 | Sore Thumbs | Room 3 | Poetry Reading Video
Community Fellows:
Nathalie Khankan
Nathalie Khankan is the author of quiet orient riot (Fall 2020), winner of Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin. Her work appears in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, The Volta, and Crab Creek Review. Straddling Danish, Finnish, Syrian and Palestinian homes and heirlooms, Nathalie currently lives in San Francisco. She teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley.
Made Here:
inside calamity, calamity
Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison is the author of Risk, which will be published by Black Ocean in Spring 2024. Her other books include After Urgency (which won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize) and the true keeps calm biding its story (which won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, James Laughlin Award, N.California Book Award, & DiCastagnola Award). Her poems have been recently published in APR, Fence, and other journals. She is the co-publisher of Omnidawn. She teaches and gives writing consultations. Her website: www.rustymorrison.com
Made Here:
notes from the understory (level 5) | catastropha | This Piece of Writing Began
