“I am a product of the Salvadorean diaspora. My writing is concerned with the connection between the personal and the universal, nature, our natures, wilderness, wildness, and the ways that being under attack survive. It is a source of great joy and inspiration to work with writers and artists of all ages to explore and help them unearth their own words.”

MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis (Nomadic Press, 2016) and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press, 2017). She is a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and her poem “The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself Among the Ruins” was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue 2017 Poetry Award. She is a co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a fellow with CantoMundo, and guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the Fall of 2018.

During her residency, MK will focus on her current book-length essay, Deforestation, in which she deconstructs and melds traditional forms such as sonnets, mini-epics, and documentary poems, and distills them into a lyric essay that explores ecological thought. She is excited to host workshops on nature writing, experimental writing, and hybrid writing during her residency, combined with readings.