Kurt is a long-time moderator for the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop. He regularly contributes to LitQuake and LitCamp publications and events, and his writing has appeared in The Racket and Dragon. He will soon complete the third draft of River Time, a novel about family, trauma and LGBTQ+ struggles that runs from 1920s Berlin to modern America.
Speaker – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community
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
