Professor Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose credits include the documentaries, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha and Who Killed Vincent Chin? Her films have premiered at the Cannes, Locarno, New Directors/New Films, San Francisco, Sundance and Toronto film festivals and the Whitney Biennial. Her current works are the documentary and transmedia project, No Más […]

Việt Thanh Nguyễn’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel […]

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, novelist and theorist of post-colonial literature, is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University […]

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. His research-based work revolves largely around language and sociopolitical dynamics. Directly informed by Historic narratives, material significance, and geography, his subject matter deals with circumstances where power relations are unbalanced. As a naturalized American, his investigation of cultural markers are embedded in objects, […]

UCSC Creative Writing Program, Undergraduate Student Reading The UC Santa Cruz Creative Writing Program Presents The Lives of Other Songs Living Writers Series Spring 2017 Thursdays / 5:20-6:50pm / Humanities Lecture Hall April 13, 2017: Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015) May 4, 2017: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, author of A Home […]

Lauren Levin, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) Lauren Levin is the author of THE BRAID (Krupskaya, 2016) and the forthcoming TWO ESSAYS (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018) as well as several chapbooks, including The Lens (Little Red Leaves, 2014) and Working (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2012). From 2011-2014, she co–edited the Poetic Labor Project. […]

Rosa Alcalá, author of Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010) Rosa Alcalá is the author of a poetry collection Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010) and two chapbooks: Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna, 2003) and Undocumentary (Dos Press, 2008). Alcalá has also translated poetry by Cecilia Vicuña, Lourdes Vázquez, and Lila Zemborain, among others. Recent translations include Zemborain's […]

Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015) Born in San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has educated in detention centers from New York's Rikers Island to California's San Quentin State […]

Peter Orner is the author of two story collections, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories, and two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. He has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for […]

Elizabeth Willis's most recent book, Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Other books include Address (Wesleyan, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England prize for poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); and The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995). Her poems have appeared […]