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.
Josen Diaz and Joe DeVera
April 16th, 5:20–6:55PM in Humanities Lecture Hall
Josen Diaz’s work addresses race, gender, colonialism, and authoritarianism, race and subjectivity; gender and sexuality studies; transpacific studies; Asian American studies; and Philippine and Filipinx studies. 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 Social Text, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Signs, and Journal of Asian American Studies, among others. She serves as a section editor for Lateral, editorial board member for the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and Feminist Pedagogy Journal, and board member for the Association for Asian American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and was previously a faculty member at the University of San Diego and a fellow with the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz was also a visiting fellow at the Institute of American Culture at UCLA and a visiting scholar at the Center for Philippine Studies, University of Hawai’i, Mānoa.
Joe deVera’s paintings, prints, and installations examine the possible relationships between historiography and art objects while investigating the resonant aftermath of mass conflict. Having emigrated from the Philippines as a youth and enlisting in the Marine Corps after high school (serving two combat deployments), deVera’s works are also autobiographical observations of power structures and the machines of empire.
Alongside his studio practice, deVera’s expanded pedagogical work emphasizes community engagement and humanitarian advocacy. He has helped organize and teach numerous veteran-focused art workshops that cultivate solidarity and open dialogue within military communities through visual language. He was also deeply involved in providing arts education to refugees, at-risk youth, and incarcerated populations throughout Southern California.
He was recently named the MacDowell Residency (St. Peterborough, NH) Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellow (2025). Some of his other awards and residencies include the Yaddo Residency (Saratoga Springs, NY) The Self-Help Graphics Professional Print Atelier Invitational (Boyle Heights, CA), The Vermont Studio Center Full Merit Scholarship (Johnson, VT), and The University of Iowa Grant Wood Fellowship (Iowa City IA). His works have been featured in art publications & journals such as Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, and KCET’s ArtBound.
He lives in St. Louis, MO, where he is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT) and has a BFA in Fine Art Drawing and Painting from California State University, Fullerton (Fullerton, CA).
Nathan Osorio
April 30th, 5:20–6:55PM in Humanities Lecture Hall
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut collection of poetry, Querida, was selected by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver De la Paz as a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Chapbook Fellowship. His writing has also appeared in Notre Dame Review, The Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Foundation. He is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine. Learn more at nathanxosorio.com.
Erica Hunt, Tonya M. Foster, and Tisa Bryant
May 14th, 5:20–6:55PM in Humanities Lecture Hall
Erica Hunt is a poet and essayist. Her books include Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, and VERONICA: A Suite in X Parts. Jump the Clock, a new and selected collection of Hunt’s poems, was published by Nightboat Books.
Hunt’s poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, Hambone, In the American Tree and Conjunctions. among other publications. Essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, A-LINE, and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies.
Hunt has taught as a Literary Arts and English department program at Naropa, Cave Canem Writers Workshop, Long Island University, Brown University, and St. John’s University. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of the anthology Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing in 2018 from Kore Press.
Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, the Emily Harvey Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/the University of Cape Town Program in Public Policy. In 2024, Hunt received the Joseph Brodsky Fellowship at the American Academy of Rome.
In recent years, Hunt has embarked on a string of collaborations with composers Marty Ehrlich, Myra Melford, Ingrid Laubrock, and John Aylward, with recordings forthcoming in 2025 and 2026.
Tonya M. Foster, (PhD; MFA), is a poet, essayist and Black womanist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections—Thingifications :: A Mathematics of Chaos (Ugly Duckling Presse); a chapbook—AHotB Sputnik and Fizzle); a 2-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop; and an anthology of experimental creative drafts. Dr. Foster serves as the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, where she is also a Director of the Poetry Center.
Tisa Bryant is the author of Residual, a nonfiction assemblage of the interiors of grief, the home as archive, and the mystery of mothers, published in 2026 from Nightboat Books. Her first book, Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on the mythologies of Black presences in film, literature and visual art, was reissued by Wave Books in 2024. She is co-editor of the three-volume, cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborated with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book, a series of visual mixtapes and love letters to Black people and Black culture, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is an editor of hybrid writing for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and editor for The Deep West Assembly, a monograph of recent works by filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Her writing has recently appeared in Brink, in exhibition catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in various anthologies and publications. She is Associate Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Terri Witek
May 21st, 5:20–6:55PM in Humanities Lecture Hall
Terri Witek was born in Sandusky, Ohio and studied at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Body Switch (2016), Exit Island (2013), The Shipwreck Dress (2010), Fools and Crows (2003), Carnal World (2005), as well as a comic book chapzine and other works on paper. Witek’s poetry often traces both the contiguities and breakages between words and images: she has collaborated with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) since 2005. Their works together include gallery shows, video, performance and site-specific projects—these have been featured internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami and Lisbon. Two new collaborations with digital artist Matt Roberts use augmented reality technology for smart phones to poetically map cities. Witek teaches poetry and poetics at Stetson University, where she holds the Sullivan Chair in creative writing. She has taught in the Prague Summer Literary Seminar and the West Chester Poetry Conference and currently runs the Fernando Pessoa Game with Cyriaco Lopes during the Disquiet International Literary Program in Portugal.
Student Reading
June 4th, 5:20–6:55PM in Humanities Lecture Hall
