Laleh Khadivi is a fiction writer who lives in Oakland, California. Her three books of the Kurdish Trilogy were named New York Times Editor’s Choice selections and won, among other awards, a Whiting Award, an NEA grant and the Stein Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in the SF Chronicle, VQR, LA Times and she is the chair of the University of San Francisco’s MFA Program.
Speaker – Revisions and the Muse
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
