Explore Panels By Creative Discipline

Icon of a pencil writing in a speech bubble, indicating editing or writing.
Silhouette of a person's shoe footprints with a dotted circular path around them
Black and white icon of a video camera with a lens on the right and two circles representing the camera's viewfinder on the top left.

Creative
Writing

Silhouette of a microphone with a cord.
A musical note symbol on a black background with horizontal white lines resembling a music staff.
Simple black and white icon of a camera with a large circular lens in the center.
Icon of a person walking along a trail with a mountain and sun in the background.

Previous Creative Writing Panelists

Blue and black pie chart with a large blue section.
A man with glasses, a baseball cap, and a goatee smiling at the camera.

Alan Chazaro

  • 2025 Panelist
    Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco. His work can be found in KQED, L.A. Times, GQ, NPR, The Guardian, SLAM and more.

Portrait of a bald man with glasses wearing a checkered shirt, standing against a neutral background.

Eliot Schain

  • 2025 Panelist
    I was a high school teacher for twenty-eight years, have been a psychotherapist for twenty, and a poet all along. Publications include poems in APR and Ploughshares, among others, and critical reviews in Fort Da and Poetry Flash. My most recent book, The Distant Sound, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press; I have released two spoken word albums—collaborations with blues guitarist Harrison Flynn—on Apple Music and Spotify.

Close-up of a smiling woman with shoulder-length dark hair, a nose ring, and wearing a patterned top, standing against a plain background.

Preeti Vangani

  • 2025 Panelist
    Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet & writer based in San Francisco and holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers, forthcoming from River River Books (Feb 2026). Her work has been published in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize.Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received grants from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA.

Smiling man with short, dark hair, mustache, goatee, and light skin, wearing a plaid jacket, in a bookstore or library environment.

J.K. Fowler

  • 2025 Panelist
    J. K. Fowler is a current fellow in the CA for the Arts Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program (GAAP), current Executive Director of the Bay Area Book Festival, Policy Analyst and Special Programs/Community Outreach with BAMBD, CDC, and Operations Support for APEN and APEN Action. Previously, he founded and ran Nomadic Press, a community rooted publishing house headquartered in Oakland and sat on Oakland's Cultural Affairs Commission, during which time he helped launch the Oakland Poet Laureate Program.

A man taking a selfie outdoors in fall, with trees with red and orange leaves in the background.

Jaime Cortez

  • 2024, 2025 Panelist
    Jaime Cortez is an author and visual artist based in Watsonville and the San Francisco Bay Area. He has exhibited his art across the Bay Area in venues that include the Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Galeria de la Raza, and Southern Exposure. Jaime's debut short story collection Gordo, was published by Grove Atlantic Press in 2021 and received national acclaim.

Close-up of a woman with black curly hair, light skin, smiling outdoors with green foliage in the background.

Claudia Morales

  • 2025 Panelist
    Claudia is an author and scholar from Chiapas, Mexico. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative writing at Dominican University of California. And she also is the author of two novels No habra retorno (2015), winner of the Rosario Castellanos National Novel Award 2015, and Cálao Bicorne (2023). Recently, her short fiction book Lacandona Speed was recognized in the First International Intergenre Writing Contest in Spanish in Canada and the United States, Literal, Latin American Voices

Close-up of a smiling woman with short blonde hair, blue eyes, and a gold and white earring, against a blue background.

Rebecca Black

  • 2024 Panelist
    Rebecca is a poet, former professor, and believer in the power of art in our communities. Her book, Cottonlandia, won a Juniper Prize in Poetry, and she has received NEA, Fulbright, and Stegner Fellowships. Originally from Albany, Georgia, she served a double term as the Poet Laureate of her adopted hometown of Albany, CA from 2016-2020.

A smiling woman wearing a black headwrap, striped shirt, butterfly earrings, and purple lipstick, standing in front of a beige wall with a framed painting in the background.

Meilani Clay

  • 2024 Panelist
    Meilani is a writer, mama, and educator from Oakland, CA. Her debut poetry collection, and the creek don't rise, won the 2021 Michael Rubin Book Award from San Francisco State University's Fourteen Hills Press. A graduate of Howard University, the University of San Francisco's Urban Education and Social Justice program, and a current MFA Poetry candidate at SFSU, Meilani aspires to be in school forever, to bridge worlds with her words, and to one day build forts out of books written by Black folks.

Close-up of an elderly woman with long gray hair tied in pigtails, wearing a blue patterned top, standing outdoors.

Maw Shein Win

  • 2024 Panelist
    Maw is a poet and educator who teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and her most recent poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in 2024.

Close-up of a woman with short dark hair and a bright smile, wearing a red shirt, outdoors with blurred green background.

  • 2024 Panelist
    Judy is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged). She is a recipient of the New Issues Poetry Prize and a Graves Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities, and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Millay, the Vermont Studio Center. Judy directs the MFA Creative Writing program at Dominican University of California.

Judy Halebsky

Close-up photo of a woman with straight dark hair and bangs, smiling softly, outdoors with blurred greenery in the background.

  • 2024 Panelist
    Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023) and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019). From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Sierra Magazine.

Jenny Odell

Portrait of a young man with glasses, wearing a light-colored shirt, standing in front of pink and purple flowers.

  • 2023 Panelist
    Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí is a KQED Community Reporter who works to make journalism more accessible across the Bay Area, telling stories in both English and Spanish across new platforms. One of his motivators to become a journalist was art — because of its unique capacity for storytelling. Painting, dance and music inform his passion to create multimedia journalism that is engaging and accessible to all.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomeli

Young woman with short hair wearing a black hat, brown vest, and lace black shirt, looking to the side outdoors at sunset near a body of water.

Rachel Economy

  • 2023 Panelist
    Rachel Economy is a poet-performer, sustainable designer, and resilient systems educator, with a penchant for mixing art forms to re-imagine and encounter the world around and within. Rachel's poetry and writing have appeared in Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, Dark Mountain, the Wild Gods anthology from New Rivers Press and Dark Matter Women Witnessing.

A close-up photo of a woman with long, dark hair smiling at the camera, outdoors during daylight with a clear sky in the background.

Evelyn Ibarra

  • 2022, 2023 Panelist
    Evelyn Ibarra is an architect and poet. She taught poetry and fiction at New York University, and served as both the Poetry and Translation Editor for the Washington Square Review. She worked as an architect for fifteen years, designing schools and houses in cities around the world. She is currently the Communications Manager at Kairos Music Academy.

A man with a beard and wearing a polka dot blazer is adjusting a colorful patterned hat on his head, standing against a plain background.

Alexis Madrigal

  • 2023 Panelist
    Alexis Madrigal is the co-host of KQED’s Forum. He is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, and the creator of the podcast, Containers. He was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Information School, and is working on a book about Oakland and the Bay Area's revolutionary ideas.

A middle-aged man with short gray hair wearing round glasses and a dark sweater, sitting in a chair with a neutral expression.

John Parman

  • 2022, 2023 Panelist
    John Parman worked as an architect and planner for 40 years. He’s on the editorial and design committee of ARCADE, the Seattle design and culture magazine, and is an advisor to Room One Thousand, the annual publication of graduate students at U.C. Berkeley CED. John believes that finding one's own voice is also clearing away the tropes in order to work out what we think and how we want to articulate it.

A smiling man with dark hair, wearing a dark blazer and a light blue shirt, resting his hand on his chin against a plain white wall background.

Juvenal Acosta

  • 2022 Panelist
    Juvenal Acosta has published fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is the author of a trilogy of noir novels called "Trilogía Negra" (El cazador de tatuajes, Terciopelo violento, and La hora ciega), and a neogothic vampire novel: Tenebroso. Acosta has published three books in collaboration with artists: Paper of Live Flesh and Tango of the Scar (both limited edition artist books) and Tauromaquia (an essay on bullfighting and photography).

A woman with long black hair smiling near a window in a modern indoor setting.

Aimee Phan

  • 2022 Panelist
    Aimee Phan received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. She is the author of two books, We Should Never Meet: Stories and the novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today and The Oregonian among other publications. She currently teaches as an associate professor in writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California.

A man with short light brown hair, wearing a black shirt, looking directly at the camera with a serious expression, in front of a plain gray background.

Stephen Rumph

  • 2022 Panelist
    Stephen Rumph teaches music history at the University of Washington and wrote Beethoven After Napoleon (2004), Mozart and the Enlightenment Semiotics (2011), and The Faure Song Cycles (2021). He sings professionally as an operatic tenor and has performed leading roles and solos with opera companies and symphony orchestras throughout the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest.

    Stephen's hopes the CYA will encourage Bay Area youth both to create their own artworks and appreciate the treasures of other creative artists.

A woman with short, dark hair with blonde highlights and light makeup, looking slightly to her left.

Christine No

  • 2022 Panelist
    Christine is a Korean American poet, filmmaker, and daughter of immigrants. She is the author of the book of poetry Whatever Love Means (Barrelhouse Books) and a Sundance Alum, VONA Fellow, two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee. She has served as Assistant Features Editor for the Rumpus, as Fellow, then as a Program Coordinator for VONA. Currently, Christine is a board member with Quiet Lightning, a Bay Area literary nonprofit.

A person smiling, holding an electric guitar, in a black and white photo with a dark background.

Chanelle Ignant

  • 2022 Panelist
    Chanelle Ignant is the Internship Program Manager at Women's Audio Mission, as well as a performer and guitar teacher. She previously led youth media initiatives at KQED, working with Bay Area high school students to produce audio and written content for on-air programs. Chanelle deeply believes in cheering youth on as they hone their creative practices.