Preserving Ancestral Knowledge as BIPOC Writers

Event date:
Saturday, May 30
Event time:
1:30pm-2:30pm
Location:
Brower Center, Tamalpais Room
Audiences:
Booksales:
Book Society, in the lobby of the venue

Our workshop will start with a panel discussion, comprised of BIPOC writers who are part of the Rooted & Written program, on how we integrate our histories into our work.

This session will blend conversation and craft on how we listen to, record, and honor ancestral knowledge on the page, without flattening it for mainstream expectations. Then we’ll talk about writing. Using guided prompts, participants will draft ideas for new work that gathers memory, place, language, and family stories into poems, micro-essays, or short scenes.

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.

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