Ajuan Mance

Ajuan Mance (she/they) is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California and a Professor of Illustration at the California College of the Arts. Ajuan is the author of several books including, most recently, 1001 Black Men: Portraits of Masculinity at the Intersections; Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance; and the children’s picture book What Do Brothas Do All Day? Ajuan’s comics have appeared in the Women’s Review of Books, New Yorker.com and several anthologies, including: We’re Still Here, winner of the 2019 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology; Drawing Power, winner of the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Anthology; We Belong: An All-Black/All-Queer Sci-Fi/Fantasy Anthology, and others. Gender Studies: Portrait of an Accidental Outlaw, Ajuan’s first graphic novel, was nominated for the 2024 Ignatz Award for Best Comics Collection.

2025 Headliners 

Moderator  – “Writing as an Other”

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

2025 Writers’ Workshops

Speaker A Compass in the Wilderness: Poetry in the Age of Environmental Crisis