Photo credit: Jeremiah Barber

Lauren Markham

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her work has appeared in VQRHarper’sThe New York Times MagazineThe GuardianThe New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Our Beautiful, Burning World

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