Photo credit: JCPenney Portraits

Mary Shyne

Mary Shyne is a Chicago-area native, who spent a decade in New York working in publishing before getting her MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies. She currently lives in the Bay Area where she works on all things Snoopy at the Schulz Studio. Her comics have appeared in The Nib, Electric Literature and Solrad.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

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