Dorothy Lazard

Dorothy Lazard is widely known as a librarian and public historian. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Center, where she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history. Her memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, is an intellectual coming-of-age story set in San Francisco and Oakland during the heady 1960s and 1970s.  She is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the Oakland Public Library where she worked for twenty years.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – A Memoir for Remembrance

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