Photo credit: TaSin Sabir

ayodele nzinga

ayodele nzinga is poet laureate of Oakland, founder of Lower Bottom Playaz and BAMBD CDC, a California Arts Legacy Artist, a Rainin Fellow, and a member of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame. nzinga holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness and a PHD in Transformative Education and Change. She is the author of Preforming Literacy a Narrative Inquiry into Performance PedagogyThe Horse EatersSorrowLand OracleIncandescent, and Poet Tree(s).

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World

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