SARATOGA, Calif. — Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program is proud to announce its recent selection of twenty-two Literary Arts Fellows. These writers of exceptional talent were recently awarded a three-month residency in the Lucas Artists Residency Program. This distinguished group includes individuals working in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and prose, theater, television and film. These newly selected Fellows hail from across the United States and Puerto Rico to Belgium, Canada, Egypt, and Morocco; other Fellows have roots in and bear stories from Cuba, France, Guam, India, Kenya, Philippines, Morocco, and Vietnam.
Every three years, the Lucas Artists Program (LAP) invites a distinguished panel of up to 100 international nominators to identify emerging, mid-career, or established artists who have the potential to become significant literary voices of their generation. Applications submitted by these nominated artists are then reviewed by an independent panel of jurors. This year’s jury consisted of Stanley Delgado, Robin Ekiss, Quỳnh-Mai Nguyễn, Rebecca Peabody, Alex Perez, Lori A. Wood, Brenda Wong Aoki, and Anuradha Vikram.
Each Fellow is awarded three months of time in the Lucas Artists Residency, which can be used over a three-year period, with the ability to return multiple times. This represents significant ongoing support for these artists to develop new work, take risks, and forge collaborative partnerships. The LAP also supports them in engaging with San Francisco Bay Area communities through public programs. This approach is grounded in Montalvo’s belief that artists’ voices enrich our world and serve as a catalyst for debate about issues important to us all.
Montalvo Arts Center is located within a 175-acre public park and historic property in the hears of the Silicon Valley in California. Montalvo began hosting artists in residency in 1939, making it the oldest residency program west of the Mississippi Rover. The LAP facility was in augurated in 2004. Since then, it has welcomed over 1,400 artists from more than thirty countries. The LAP’s campus comprises 11 free-standing, state-of-the-art live/work studios designed by artist-and-architect collaborative teams, a Commons building, and a library.
“The Lucas Artists Residency Program is the soul of Montalvo,” said Executive Director Angela McConnell. “It is one of the key ways in which we reaffirm our mission to engage the community in the creative process, and it has gained international recognition as a creative incubator and a model of curatorial practice.”
Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program Director, Kelly Sicat said, “We look forward to welcoming this truly remarkable group of writers into the creative community of Lucas Artists Program. We are honored to have the opportunity to support these artists and their practices, and to be able to share their work with the greater Silicon Valley community.”
The 2025 Lucas Artists Literary Arts Fellows include Charles Barber, author of acclaimed narrative nonfiction which tell stories of activists who changed the world; award-winning illustrator of children’s books and comics journalism, Thi Bui; celebrated slam poetry champion and the first Black Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, Tshaka Campbell; Jaime Cortez, who combines humor and tragedy to tell stories of resilient survivors living on the margins of the economy, the law, and social acceptability; winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Andrew Greer; and Puerto Rica poet, educator, translator of trans experience, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera.
2025 Literary Arts Fellows
Charles Barber
Jury Panel
Stanley Delgado
Stanley Delgado is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program, where he was a teaching artist at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and The Los Angeles Review. His work has been widely recognized, including selection as a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2024 for “Camera Man,” which follows a grieving cameraman as he travels through different neighborhoods of Los Angeles, filming sensational tales for a Spanish-language television show. Delgado’s work “Bicho, Bicha” (2019) won first place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and “Mexican Shoots Himself in the Chest” received the 2019 Los Angeles Review Literary Award for flash fiction. He was awarded the Anthony Veasna So Scholarship for Fiction from Adroit Journal.
Delgado is a 2023 Literary Arts Fellow in the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program at Montalvo Arts Center. He currently lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at Charles R. Drew University in Watts.
Robin Ekiss
Robin Ekiss is the author of The Mansion of Happiness (University of Georgia Press, 2009). A former Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, she has been a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers. She has also received grants, scholarships, and residencies from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Atlantic, APR, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. She is on the Advisory Council of Litquake, and lives in San Francisco.
Quynh-Mai Nguyen
Quỳnh-Mai Nguyễn is a multidisciplinary social practice artist, poet, creative producer, community organizer, and musician based in San José, California. She has an imagination that dares to transform and nurture the world around her through her stories, art, design, and civil interactions. As a writer, she has a quiet strength that is both tender and fierce with narratives driven to preserve the stories of her family, identity, and experiences. In 2017, her poem “Mai” was published in spring mother tongue, an anthology of poetic voices from Santa Clara County. Selected poems have also been published in the Better Ancestors anthology by Quiet Lightning. When she is not writing, she is creating community spaces, social practice art and storytelling projects, and building cultural awareness around the narratives of women, Vietnamese Americans, AAPI, and stories of those untold.Some of her projects include: The Name Dictionary; Lips Uncurled, Eyes Forward – an AAPI social art exhibition, and Lunar – a Lunar New Year art exhibition. She wields over 14 years of experience working in the arts, culture, and for community as co-owner and creative director of Art Builds Community, a women-led public art consulting, curation, policy, and community engagement team that brings critical thinking and artists’ perspectives to the design of public and private spaces. Nguyen is a MALI alumni, a 2020 880s Emerging City Champion, and a KQED Arts Bay Brilliant recognized cultural worker in the Bay Area in 2018.
Rebecca Peabody
Rebecca Peabody is an award-winning writer, educator, and certified life coach. Her scholarly books include the award-winning Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race (2016), as well as five edited or co-edited volumes on art and visual culture in a global context: Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (2022), Visualizing Empire: Africa, France, and the Politics of Representation (2021), Lawrence Alloway, Critic and Curator (2015), Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945 – 1980 (2011), and Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945 – 1975 (2011).
Rebecca’s trade book The Unruly PhD: Doubts, Detours, Departures and Other Success Stories (2014) looks at graduate education at a moment of rapid change for both higher education and the job market – and gestures towards her commitment to mentoring and coaching graduate students and emerging professionals. She is currently at work on the follow-up to Unruly PhD (due out in early 2027), and on a work of narrative non-fiction that explores childhood formation from the perspective of mid-life.
She holds a joint PhD in the History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University, is head of Research Projects & Academic Outreach at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, and has taught at Loyola Marymount University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Southern California, and Yale University.
Alex Perez
Alex Perez is an award-winning director, choreographer, performer, and educator. Companies he has been involved with include: The Old Globe Theater, San Diego; TheatreWorks Silicon Valley; American Musical Theater of San Jose; Broadway by the Bay; and Beach Blanket Babylon’s 20th Anniversary Gala. His favorite directing projects include Miss Saigon, In the Heights, Sunday in the Park with George, Hello Dolly!, Crazy for You. Bay Area audiences have enjoyed seeing Alex as Will Rogers in The Will Rogers Follies, Mr. Applegate Damn Yankees, and Harold Hill in The Music Man. He received the Bay Area Theater Critics Award for Best Direction for Broadway by the Bay’s production of Miss Saigon. Alex worked for 30 years at Menlo School in Atherton, California, where he helped design the 400-seat performing arts center, and 40,000 square foot Creative Arts and Design Center. His Menlo School productions of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, and The King and I received the American Musical Theater of San Jose Best High School Musical Award. Alex currently serves as the co-chair of the Board of Directors for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, board member of Oscar Hammerstein Museum and Theater Education Center, and also sits on the National Advisory Council for Yellowstone Forever. He earned his MFA degree from The Old Globe Theater, San Diego.
Brenda Wong Aoki
Brenda Wong Aoki is a transdisciplinary playwright, performer, and cultural architect whose work has helped redefine American performance for five decades. Of Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Scottish ancestry, she draws from her family’s 129-year history in San Francisco to illuminate the essential hybridity of U.S. culture—decades before the field had language for multidisciplinary practice.
Trained in Noh and Kyogen, Aoki creates large-scale theatrical works that move fluidly between theater, orchestra, jazz ensemble, taiko, contemporary dance, film, and museum installation. Her genre-defying works have been presented at the Kennedy Center, the Apollo Theater, the Adelaide International Festival (as the American representative), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and SF MOMA. In collaboration with Maestro Kent Nagano, she created the first symphonic dramatic work of its kind since Peter and the Wolf, integrating Japanese instruments and Nogaku form into a fully staged orchestral production that transformed the concert hall into an immersive underwater seascape.
Her work is archived in the American Folklife Collection at the Library of Congress. Honors include the Rainin Theater Fellowship 2025, Hewlett 50 Playwright Commission, ASCAP and American Federation of Independent Music Awards (two Best Spoken Word), three Hollywood Dramalogue (script, score, performance), Critic Circle Awards, Izzie Nominations, and support from the Wattis Foundation and the Government of Japan.
In 1997, she co-founded First Voice, one of only two U.S. organizations dedicated to producing cross-cultural performance at the highest artistic level. 2026 marks her 50th year as a working artist—still shaping the field she helped pioneer.
Lori A. Wood
Lori A. Wood has worked in the field of artist residency programs since 1991. She served on the boards of both Artist Communities Alliance and Res Artis during their formative years. She directed Montalvo’s artist residency program from 1991 to 1995, and managed the Lucas Artists Program from 2015 to 2020. She is the founding coordinator of Nawat Fes, the artist residency program of the American Language Center / Arabic Language Institute in Fez, Morocco.
Anuradha Vikram
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. Their novel Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023) uses speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. They curated The Sky Is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then and Now for the 2025 ONE Institute Circa Queer Histories Festival. They are a consulting curator for the Metabolic Studio and a continuing lecturer in the Department of Art at University of California, Los Angeles.
In 2024 they co-curated the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Other recent curatorial projects include: Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022); Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate with Warren Neidich, Renée Petropoulos, and Christina Strassfield at Guild Hall, East Hampton Main Beach, New York (2022) and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica State Beach, California (2023); and eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves at Los Angeles State Historic Park in 2022.
Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They are a contributor to art periodicals such as Artforum, Art in America, Artillery, X-TRA, and publications from Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts, and a BS in Studio Art from New York University.