Nkeiruka Oruche & ZioraMmachi

Nkeiruka Oruche, a multimedia creative, cultural organizer, and producer, founded and directs Afro Urban Society, a hub for Pan African arts and culture. She created and directed ‘Mixtape of the Dead & Gone #1’’ dance-theater comedy about death and igbo cosmology. In 2023, she was on the creative team of ‘Nollywood Dreams’ at SF Playhouse. Oruche was a Dance/USA Artist Fellow, Kikwetu Honors Awardee, a NYFA Immigrant Artist Fellow, and YBCA 100 Honoree. She has received awards from Creative Work Fund, MAP Fund, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and California Arts Council. Her work has been featured in BBC Africa, Goethe-Institut, Fjord Review, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Coal City University-Enugu, and Oakland Museum of California.

ZioraMmachi is a 12-year old who is curious about the world around her. She loves to write, spend time with friends and family, run, read (taking away books is a dreaded consequence), take photos, listen to music, make playlists, and a lot of other things. She is a co-author of the Notable & Notorious Nigerian Women Coloring book.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Nkeiruka Oruche (Notable & Notorious Nigerian Women) coloring book

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