Cheryl Kim is an elementary school teacher from San Jose, California, and teaches second grade at an international school in Thailand. She received the SCBWI Kate Dopirak Craft and Community Award for her original manuscript for Wat Takes His Shot. When she’s not teaching or writing, she enjoys watching professional basketball with her husband and sons.
Speaker – Fighting for What You Love
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.
Speaker – A Compass in the Wilderness: Poetry in the Age of Environmental Crisis
