School of Critical Studies

The MFA Program in Creative Writing of the California Institute of the Arts is thrilled to welcome Don Mee Choi, 2024’s Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence. Choi (pronounced ‘Che’) is a markedly influential figure in contemporary experimental poetry combining the visual, the documentary and the lyrical in her highly acclaimed books.

Her Kor-Us Trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony and the forthcoming Mirror Nation) intertwines the author’s family history with the troubled and complex modern history of South Korea and its long entanglement with the imperial power and ambitions of the United States of America.

For her work Choi has already received some of the highest honors a literary artist can achieve—the National Book Award for 2020’s DMZ Colony and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her work in poetry and in the field of translation, where she’s brought so many English readers for the first time to the pages of some of the most innovative poets working in South Korea today, notably the influential feminist poet Kim Heysoon. 

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Photo credit: Dirk Skiba

The 2023 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence is Stephen Graham Jones. Jones, the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians, and 30 other books, is widely known and loved for his innovative approach to genre, particularly horror. His CalArts residency and public reading at REDCAT take place in advance of his highly anticipated sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw. Titled Don't Fear the Reaper (part two of The Indian Lake Trilogy), the book will be released on Feb. 7, 2023, by Simon & Schuster.

An important figure in contemporary Native American literature, Jones—a member of the Blackfeet Nation—adroitly remixes the conventions of literary horror fiction to construct disturbing, funny, and moving depictions of contemporary American life, especially as it is lived at the rural margins of the American West. In his work, the past is always alive and lurking somewhere in the dark just beyond the beams of our headlights.

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The 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence at CalArts is Hilton Als. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for ‘The Talk of the Town,’ he became a staff writer in 1994, theatre critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. Week after week, he brings to the magazine a rigorous, sharp, and lyrical perspective on acting, playwriting, and directing. With his deep knowledge of the history of performance—not only in theatre but in dance, music, and visual art—he shows us how to view a production and how to place its director, its author, and its performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theatre, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America. He is currently working on a new book titled I Don’t Remember (Penguin, 2021), a book length essay on his experiences in AIDS era New York.

Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

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