Photo credit: Annabelle Port

Maw Shein Win

Maw Shein Win’s latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at USF.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Garden of Possibilities

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