Photo credit: Robyn Navarro

Matthew Clark Davison

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author, with Alice LaPlante, of The Lab, Experiments in Writing Across Genre(W.W. Norton), based on The Lab: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school Matthew started in San Francisco in 2007 in a friend’s living room. He is the author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press), which was hailed as one of “46 Must-Read Books by Queer Authors” in Esquire Magazine. His prose has been published in BOMBLitHubLambda LiteraryThe Advocate, Exquisite PandemicGuernica, The Atlantic MonthlyLumina Magazine, and others.

2025 Writers’ Workshops 

Speaker  – The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre—Turning Obsession into Art with Aesthetic Force

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