Cave Canem fellow James Cagney is the award winning author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) and MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness (Nomadic Press, 2022). Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive will be released by Black Lawrence Press this July, 2025. He was born, raised, and currently resides in Oakland, California.
Speaker – Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future
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
