Photo credit: Peg Skorpinski

Randal Brandt

Randal Brandt is a librarian at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as Head of Cataloging and as Curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection. He is a member of the American Library Association’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section and the Northern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Murder in Mysterious Places

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