Photo credit: Carla Gómez

Cynthia Gómez

Cynthia Gómez writes horror and other types of speculative fiction, set primarily in Oakland, where she makes her home. She has a particular love for themes of revenge, retribution, and resistance to oppression, and she loves to write dark and frightening things while cuddling with her shadow, aka her adorable little dog. Her work has appeared/will appear in Fantasy MagazineStrange HorizonsLuna Station QuarterlyNightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, her first collection, was released from Cursed Morsels Press in July 2024. 

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Nightmares Revealed: The Rise of Latinx Horror Fiction

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