Aida Salazar

Aida Salazar is an award-winning author and arts activist whose writings for adults and children explore issues of identity and social justice. She is the author of the middle-grade verse novels Ultraviolet (a Golden Poppy Book Award finalist), The Moon Within (International Latino Book Award Winner), and Land of the Cranes (Américas Award Winner), as well as the picture book anthology In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color, and the Caldecott Honor Book Jovita Wore Pants: The Story of a Mexican Freedom Fighter illustrated by Molly Mendoza. Salazar is a founding member of Las Musas, a Latinx kidlit debut author collective. She lives with her family of artists in Oakland, California.

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