Photo credit: Reva Keller

Mona Damluji

Mona Damluji grew up on the other side of the world from the places that her ancestors called home. And yet, thanks to her parents, she has always felt a deep attachment to her Iraqi and Lebanese roots. As a student, Mona moved around quite a bit, over the years called many places home including Beirut, Boston, Berkeley, London, and China. Today she lives and works in Santa Barbara, California with her family, where she’s an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies. When she’s not hanging out with her kids or teaching her students, you can find her writing, organizing poetry readings, and dreaming up her next creative project.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Homeland to Home

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