Keenan Norris’s latest book is Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings. Keenan’s novel The Confession of Copeland Cane won the 2022 Northern California Book Award and his essays have received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and Folio: Eddie Award. Keenan is Associate Professor of English and coordinator of the Steinbeck Fellows Program at San José State.
Speaker – Essay as Form
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
