Benoit Denizet-Lewis

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College, a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and a New York Times bestselling author. His new book, You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation (April 2026), examines why and how people reinvent themselves—and how we judge those transformations. He has received awards and fellowship support from New America, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born and raised in San Francisco, he now divides his time between Boston and Prague.

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