Unfinished Atlas: Begining When the World has Ended

Event date:
Sunday, May 31
Event time:
4:00pm-5:00pm
Booksales:
Nomadic Bookshop, right by the stage
Access:
FREE

Unfinished Atlas: Beginning When the World Has Ended, four poets gather at the shifting edge between collapse and creation.

Deema Shehabi writes with luminous attention to exile, memory, and the fragile architectures of home, tracing how language carries both loss and possibility. Daniel Summerhill’s work carries the pulse of music, rhythmic and urgent. It explores justice, history, and the bright insistence of possibility. Cynthia Manick brings a sharp lyric intelligence to questions of culture, place, and survival in a rapidly changing world. Iain Haley Pollock’s poems move with wry precision through landscapes of labor, ecology, and human ambition, probing how we inhabit the structures we’ve set in motion. Emceeing the conversation, Lourdes Figueroa brings a deep engagement with literature, and a fascination with how memory and stories move through communities and change the future. 

Together, these poets sketch an atlas still in progress. One that is attentive to rupture, but equally committed to imagining what might grow in its wake.

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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