Photo credit: Laura Skayhan

Cara Black

Cara Black is the author of twenty-one books in the New York Times bestselling Aimée Leduc series, the national bestseller Three Hours in Paris, and its follow-up, Night Flight to Paris. She has been awarded La Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel—the medal for distinguished service in sharing historic and cultural insights of Paris by the French Republic, received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, and her books have been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and visits Paris frequently.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Murder in Mysterious Places

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