Maker, Mentor, Muse: The Spirit of the Work

Event date:
Saturday, May 30
Event time:
12:15pm-1:15pm
Location:
Brower Center, Kinzie Room
Audiences:
Booksales:
Book Society, in the lobby of the venue

Maker, Mentor, Muse is an online teaching platform founded in 2022 by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, Mary Volmer, and Maw Shein Win. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In this free one-hour workshop, we offer guided writing experiments for poetry and prose that invites participants to explore how their sacred traditions, rituals, and belief systems inform and inspire their writing processes. Join us! Maker, Mentor, Muse

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