Photo credit: Ian Tuttle

Janis Cooke Newman

Janis Cooke Newman is the author of two award-winning historical novels, as well as a memoir. She is also the founder of Page Street and LitCamp.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – Paths to Publishing: From the Big Five to DIY
Speaker  – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community

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