Our 2025–2026 Residency Recipients
Angie Sijun Lou
Writer Angie Sijun Lou is a fiction writer and creative writing instructor living in Oakland. "My practice is indebted to my family’s history of living undocumented in the United States," she writes, "they’ve taught me to look to the page as a site of permanence when our dreams and labors have been eclipsed by a state of eternal transit." Her stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, BOMB, The Iowa Review, FENCE, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz, where she completed a dissertation about the shadow of Cold War militarism in Asian American experimental poetry. She is working on her first novel, Pure Leisure, which traces the life of a Chinese American woman named Laiyla as she travels to China in an all-fated attempt to uncover her family's revolutionary past. 
Emily Soreghan
Writer "I follow the trail of that which is animal and strictly alive. I watch for the murmurations on clear days — the incandescent and redeemable about our here-and-now... I write to give form to the texture of longing, the freedom that is our rhetorical right and how faintly we all seem to feel it, why so many seem held taught between the hyper-sexualization and hysterical repression of modern America, and how this manifests in the minutia of daily intimacy. In my decade crawling across the American West and working odd jobs, I became especially interested in how the layers of places — geological, paleontological, ecological, historical, cultural, and personal — sediment into what we encounter... While my medium of choice is fiction, I draw from my ethnographic training and my upbringing as the child of two geologists to map the contours of desire onto the landscapes they animate... I don’t believe writing solves problems. I do believe literature demands tolerance for ambiguity, which is a good start. And I believe close attention, whether it be to the sighs and quick glances that seal the fate of a relationship, or to the minuscule asters growing in a crumbled cement foundation, is the most potent antidote to overwhelming despair. To start small, to start with what your hands can reach and your eyes can see, and to never give in to the numbing din. This is what I hope to do at Joshua Tree." |
Christine Johnson Duell
Writer "In 2020, thirty years into my life as a poet and 26 years into my marriage, my husband died. In the wake of that abrupt change, I couldn’t write. It turned out it was only poems I couldn’t write. When my identity shifted from wife to widow, my writing shifted too. Everything I had to say needed more room than usual on the page. Writing down all the words I had to say, in the absence of the skills I’d honed and experience I’d acquired, one verse at a time over decades, was as alien as the new hole in my life. Everything was new... When identity shifts, without a person’s permission, what happens? I learned that shedding one identity doesn’t make one invisible. It can morph into a new identity. And not all change is unexpected. Until poems return to me, I am writing a memoir in prose. A memoir about identity and shedding; assuming a new identity as a result of shedding... I’m transcribing my way through a story I am still living, using tools that are new to me. I’m not yet certain how to define or describe it, though I will say this: being stripped of an identity differs from shedding one. This is what I’m exploring in my work right now." 
Josue Bessiake
Painter Josue Bessiake is an Ivorian-American painter working across media, Bessiake uses multiple disciplines to explore the ingredients of a phenomenon using the body as the origin. Influenced by his experience as a first-generation immigrant his work reflects his desire to connect himself to his environment. In a process involving reassembly, experimentation, and collection, Bessiake’s work is a collision between practicality and abstraction, referencing scale, memory, and collective consciousness. Josue Bessiake has presented work at the National Gallery of the Bahamas, Chautauqua School of Visual Arts, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Recent Exhibitions include exhibits at The University of Texas: Edinburgh; Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA; and the University of the Bahamas. Bessiake is a recipient of the William and Ruth Fusco Prize to Encourage Artistic Achievement from Montserrat College of Art and a finalist for the AXA Art Prize at the New York Academy of Art. 
Nyame Brown
Multi-media artist Nyame is an Afrofuturist installation artist working in the media of painting, drawing, cut paper, blackboards, augmented reality, gaming, and fashion. His work addresses the Black imagination as a space for new ways to perceive the Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined—not just through unity and similarity, but by looking at the dynamics of difference. "An awareness of art history is a pertinent part of my process. My desire is to use art historical precedent as a fluid source of reference rather than a fixed and linear projection. This allows me multiple new ways of perception from the inside, not as an outsider. Creating new allegories for my characters opens an unexplored space for perception of black people, by whites and blacks... My Storytelling functions culturally and the tradition calls for expanding the idiom through improvisation, riffing, and rupturing. With Hip Hop and the Blues there is the use of allegory, metaphor, and the modernist persona... I build my narratives like scaffolding around Art History of paintings, Hip Hop, and personal history. The goal of my work is to build lore to new heights." |
Fabian Ramírez
Painter Fabian Ramírez paints dreamscapes: ghost images of vegetation, domestics interiors and other environs, concealed in a barrage of expressive colorful brush strokes, creating kaleidoscopic abstractions that only hint towards a certain place and time. His works revisit some of the fundamental elements for modern art such as the “notion of image” and “abstraction”, in order to point out the unacknowledged aspects of it, and the connection it has with some indigenous concepts. Since image represents a central phenomenon to humanity, it is precisely the origin of images that constitutes one of the fundamental enigmas to solve, not only to understand the being, but its existence within the universe. Born in Mexico City, Fabian Ramírez graduated from the Faculty of Art UNAM in Mexico City 2016, and is currently undertaking a Masters at Kunstakademie Düsseldorfunder under Ellen Gallagher’s tutelage. 
Gabriela Stragliotto
Painter Gabriela Stragliotto is a Brazilian artist of Italian descent, who grew up navigating the landscapes of Southern Brazil and the interior of the central State of Mato Grosso. Drawing from her upbringing in a farming family, her work reflects the interplay between her rural childhood and the contrasting dynamics of contemporary urban life, particularly focusing on the contradictory perceptions of space and time within these environments. Primarily working with nankin and oil on linen, Stragliotto creates compositions that loosely reference landscapes — real spaces that are contemplated and subsequently deconstructed. She transforms fragments of natural and rural settings to conceive a new, fictional territory that is informed by her explorations of the subconscious mind, dreams, and myths. Through her engagement with the processes of image construction and abstraction, her paintings function as a medium for revisiting and reorganizing these environments into dreamlike spaces that feel both strange and familiar. These works invite contemplation, as paintings that seem to linger and challenge the immediacy of contemporary experience. |