Lourdes Figueroa

Lourdes Figueroa is a queer Chicanx oral poet and award-winning poetry filmmaker whose work honors her family’s history working in el azadón in Yolo County. Based in San Francisco, she has worked as a case manager, advocate, translator, and community organizer. She has led poetry workshops at Marin Academy Literary Festival and College of Alameda and co-wrote Fugue (2017), celebrating LGBTQIA+ history in the Mission. During the pandemic, she created Paru-paru y Colibri, an intergenerational writing workshop with SOMCAN, funded by an SFAC grant. Her chapbooks include yolotl, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, and Vuelta (Nomadic Press). In 2021 she received the Nomadic Press Bay Area Literature Award for Poetry, her poem “Pieces” from yolotl was a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her long verse poem I will kiss your mouth b/w the overgrown Milpa is forthcoming in Mexico. Her latest work appears in Tierra Adentro and the poetry film Las Marimacha Fragments, made with filmmaker Peggy Peralta, A Good Symptom (3rd Thing’s Press). A native of limbo nation, she celebrates the pocha marimachita tongue and believes in your lung and throat.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Planting Poetry (Grow a Poem. Sow a Future)(all day drop-in activity)

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