Low Residency Creative Writing Summer Residency 2023
June 10, 2023
June 20-30, PNCA’s Low Residency Creative Writing program comes together for this summer’s residency. Events include talks, conversations, workshops, and readings by faculty Alejandro de Acosta, Jess Arndt, Matt Hart, Poupeh Missaghi, Vi Khi Nao, Jay Ponteri, Brandon Shimoda, Dao Strom, and Asiya Wadud. Guest artists include readings and workshops by Sterling Cunio, James Hannaham, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Sara Sutter.
Everything can be accessed via Zoom and Live Streamed on PNCA’s Youtube Channel. All times PST, and everything listed below is free and open to the public. For links, please contact Jay Ponteri at jponteri@willamette.edu.
Readings
6 pm, June 20, PNCA (room 413): Alejandro de Acosta, Matt Hart, and Vi Khi Nao
6 pm, June 21, Stelo Arts: Jess Arndt, James Hannaham, and Poupeh Missaghi
6 pm, June 26, PNCA (room 413): Jay Ponteri and Sara Sutter
6 pm, June 29, PNCA (room 413): Diana Khoi Nguyen
Reading & Talk
9 am, June 23, PNCA (room 413): Asiya Wadud
Workshops
3-5 pm, June 22-24, PNCA (room 413): The Infinite Lives of Collaboration / Vi Khi Nao
2:30-5 pm, June 28-29, PNCA (room 413): Textual Image, and Visual Text: Composing with Image and Text / Diana Khoi Nguyen
1:30-4 pm, June 30, PNCA (Lemelson Innovation Studio): Transformative Justice Initiative Poetry Workshop / Sterling Cunio
Talks
9 am, June 21, PNCA (room 413): THE ART OF THE HEIST: ON BEING DELUSIONAL / Vi Khi Nao
9 am, June 22, PNCA (room 413): Glossary for Future-Writers / Alejandro de Acosta
9 am, June 24, PNCA (room 413): Queer Somatic Realism + 3-D Writing / Jess Arndt
9 am, June 26, PNCA (room 413): IF THOU DISLIK’ST WHAT THOU FIRST LIGHT’ST ON: Speed talks on various subjects, poetic and otherwise / Matt Hart
9 am, June 27, PNCA (room 413): translation metatexts and experimentations : rethinking theories and practices / Poupeh Missaghi
9 am, June 28, PNCA (room 413): What re-members you? / Brandon Shimoda & Dao Strom
Faculty / Guest Artist Bios
Alejandro de Acosta is a teacher, writer, and translator, still in no particular order. His most recent teaching includes private tutoring in literature and philosophy. His most recent writing includes a manuscript of poems and a novel, finally. His most recent translations include poems by Macedonio Fernández, Alberto Laiseca, and Paulo de Jolly. Alejandro lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Jess Arndt is a transgenre writer seeking protuberant forms. Their debut story collection Large Animals (Catapult/Cipher) was shortlisted for the California Book Prize and their writing has recently surfaced in Conjunctions, Granta, LARB, Fence, BOMB, and in performance collaborations with The Knife. They are a co-founder of the prose experiment, New Herring Press, and when not teaching at University of Idaho, Moscow, live off-grid on an island in Washington State.
Both an Oregon Literary Arts Fellow and a PEN America Arts for Social Justice Fellow, Sterling Cunio is a spoken word poet and author who dedicated life to the service of others while inside the Oregon Department of Corrections where he served nearly 28 years before being released for outstanding reformation. Sterling was a founder of the Restorative Justice Program within Oregon State Penitentiary which focused primarily on reducing harms, building peace and transforming both the street and prison culture using arts, education, community engagement and conflict resolution. Sterling mentored countless others in positive transformation and supported them in becoming change agents as credible messengers living their amends. Since his release he works as the Program Coordinator for Willamette University’s Transformative Justice Initiative helping justice impacted people, and also works as a Story teller for Church at the Park serving Salem’s houseless population.
Matt Hart is the author of FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books 2022) and nine other books of poems. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including American Poetry Review, Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, co-edits the journal Sôrdəd and plays in the band NEVERNEW.
Poupeh Missaghi is an Assistant Professor in Literary Arts and Studies at the English Department of the University of Denver. She is a creative writer, scholar, editor, and translator (between English and Persian). Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 (Coffee House Press) and her translation of Nasim Marashi’s novel I’ll Be Strong for You in 2021 (Astra House). Her second book Sound Museum is forthcoming in 2024 (Coffee House Press). She has a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver; an MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; and an MA in Translation Studies and a BA in Translation Practice from Azad University, Tehran. She also teaches at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and Pacific Northwest College of Arts, Portland, OR.
VI KHI NAO is the author of seven poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her book, Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche is out of 11:11 in Spring 2023. The Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the 2022 recipient of the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and forthcoming collection, Root Fractures (2024). Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Jay Ponteri directed the creative writing program at Marylhurst University from 2008-2018 and is now the program head of PNCA’s Low-Residency Creative Writing program. His book of creative nonfiction Someone Told Me has just been published by Widow+Orphan House. He’s also the author of Darkmouth Inside Me (Future Tense Books, 2014) and Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), which received an Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Two of Ponteri’s essays, “Listen to this” and “On Navel Gazing” have earned “Notable Mentions” in Best American Essay Anthologies. His work has also appeared in many literary journals: Gaze, Ghost Proposal, Eye-Rhyme, Seattle Review, Forklift, Ohio, Knee-Jerk, Cimarron Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, While teaching at Marylhurst, Ponteri was twice awarded the Excellence in Teaching & Service Award. In 2007, Ponteri founded Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Artist and Writers, now part of summer programming at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC.org) on whose Resource Council he serves. He teaches memoir classes at Literary Arts. He lives with his son Oscar and Oscar's pug MO.
Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award. He has three books forthcoming: Hydra Medusa (poetry and prose, Nightboat, 2023), a book of nonfiction on the ongoing afterlife of Japanese American incarceration (City Lights, 2024), and, with the poet Brynn Saito, an anthology of poetry on JA incarceration, written by descendants of the concentration camps (Haymarket, 2025).
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions), winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books). She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship, and has received support also from RACC, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Strom was born in Vietnam and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collaborative art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and de-canon.
Sara Jannette Sutter is a writer, educator, student, and psychonaut based in Portland, OR. Sara holds a BA in philosophy, an MFA in Poetry & Creative Nonfiction, and is now in their second year at California Institute of Integral Studies, where they are focusing on somatic and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Sara teaches literature and creative writing at University of Portland, Pacific Northwest College of Art and Craft, Willamette University, and virtually at Harrisburg Area Community College. While Sara’s most recent writings have been toward fulfilling academic requirements, published works appear in Fence, the Seattle Review, Nailed Magazine, and others, along with her chapbooks, O to Be a Dragon (Finishing Line Press 2016) and Sirenomelia (Poor Claudia 2013). Sara is slowly at work on a new hybrid project that explores the generative and spiritual qualities of trauma.
Asiya Wadud is the author of several poetry collections, most recently No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body and Mandible Wishbone Solvent (forthcoming in 2024). Her recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, POETRY, Yale Review and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she also teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and Columbia University.