Azucena Rasilla

Azucena Rasilla is a bilingual journalist from East Oakland. She is a longtime reporter on Oakland arts, culture, and community. She started her career at the East Bay Express. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, Eater, Curbed, and other publications. She’s currently the arts and community reporter for The Oaklandside, and the producer and host of Culture Makers, a quarterly live event where she is in conversation with other Oakland creatives.

Where to find me at the festival

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