Margaret Elysia Garcia

Margaret Elysia Garcia (she/her) is the author of the poetry collection the daughterland, of the short story collection Graft, and the poetry chapbook Burn Scars. She writes a history column for High Country Life, a regional California magazine covering the eastern Sierra Nevada.

2025 Democracy Dialogues 

Speaker  – Mutual Aid and Community Care in California

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