Loa Niumeitolu is a Tongan poet, community organizer, educator and tender of land. She’s the director of Planting Oceania, a Pacific Islander collective that plants their ancestral Pacific Islander food and medicine, like Taro, Kava, and Ti, here on Lisjan and Raymatush territories.
Speaker – Bringing our Youth Back to the Land
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
