The Center for Art and Thought (CA+T) is excited to announce its second Artist-in-Residence: poet Ronaldo Wilson. Wilson's virtual residency begins January 16 and will continue through March 2014 on CA+T's website (centerforartandthought.org/work/project/artist-in-residence).

Ronaldo Wilson is an award-winning poet and Assistant Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of the collections Poems of the Black Object (2009), which won the Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and an Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, and Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (2008).  His poetry explores a variety of subjects, including race, the body, desire, and trauma. During his residency with CA+T, Wilson will continue work on his ongoing Off the Dome: Rants, Raps, and Meditations project, which reflects on questions of representation, selfhood, and place through solo freestyle battle-raps, lectures, and songs recorded in various contexts on his iPhone. Wilson hopes to use CA+T's Artist-in-Residence Working Blog not only to present this ever-expanding project but also to explore the process of this expansion through engaging various media and the works of other poets and artists. Wilson plans to culminate his tenure at CA+T with the creation of a single, live conceptual performance piece.

Established in 2013 with the launch of CA+T's website, the Artist-in-Residence Virtual Residency is a one-of-a-kind program that moves from the delimited physical spaces of a center or institution to the virtual spaces of the Internet, allowing residents to work from anywhere in the world. Over the course of their residencies, artists have the opportunity to work towards the completion of a project, such as a manuscript, a collection of stories, or scholarly article. The fundamental goal of the residency program is to facilitate artists' critical engagement with the public through CA+T's Artist-in-Residence Working Blog. This platform is a space for the artists to garner inspiration from an engaged audience and to work through ideas, both visually and textually. At the end of the residency, artists are expected to present their work online through, for example,  a digitally recorded podcast, a live online streamed talk, or curated online exhibition.

Wilson is CA+T's second Artist-in-Residence. He follows the success of CA+T's inaugural Artist-in-Residence, poet-historian Kimberly Alidio.