Photo credit: Susan Formaker

Daniel A. Olivas

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of 12 books including Chicano Frankenstein (Forest Avenue Press, 2024), My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions (University of Nevada Press, 2024), and Crossing the Border: New and Collected Poems (Pact Press, 2017). He is also a playwright, editor, and book critic. Widely anthologized, Olivas has written on literature for The New York TimesLos Angeles Review of BooksLos Angeles TimesZocáloLatino Book ReviewAlta Journal, and The Guardian. He earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA. By day, Olivas is a senior attorney with the California Department of Justice.

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