In Nourishment, Us.

Joe De Vera (WSU) Visual Artist and Josen Diaz (UCSC) Critic and Archivist

Joe deVera’s paintings and installations are attempts to clarify the absurd theaters of human tragedy — examining the possible relationships between historiography and art objects — while simultaneously investigating the resonant aftermath of mass conflict. Having emigrated from the Philippines as a youth and enlisting in the U.S. Marines Corps after high school — serving two combat deployments to Iraq in support of the Second Gulf War/GWOT — deVera’s works are also autobiographical observations of power structures and the machines of empire. He joined the Sam Fox School from Wake Forest University. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from California State University, Fullerton, and his Master of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking from Yale University.

Josen Masangkay Diaz (she/they) writes and teaches about race, gender, colonialism, and authoritarianism. Her book, Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2023), analyzes the formation of Filipino American subjectivity through a study of U.S.-Philippine cold war politics. Her writing appears in American Quarterly, Social Text, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Signs, and elsewhere. She serves as section editor for Lateral, editorial board member for the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and Feminist Pedagogy Journal. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego and was previously faculty at the University of San Diego and fellow with the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Living Writers Spring 2026:  Our Nourishment, US features poets, writers, critics, visual and performance artists, who demonstrate how writing and art enacts around the idea of freedom and the imaginary in the face of the constant threat of terror and erasure. In the presence of who we all are within marginalized yet expansively powerful fields of racialized and multiply lived complex and diverse identities, please come as we convene in spirit, deep celebration, and resource with one another.

About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Humanities Institute, The Laurie Sain Endowment, and the Bay Tree Bookstore.