Cynthia Li

Cynthia Li, MD, is a board-certified doctor of integrative and functional

medicine in the Bay Area, and a certified teacher and workshop coach in qigong, an ancient mind-body practice for individual and collective healing. Her earlier work centered on public health, with a focus on HIV/AIDS and underserved communities. She served on the faculty of Rachel Naomi Remen’s Healer’s Art program at UCSF Medical School. She is the author of a bestselling memoir that chronicles her healing journey through autoimmunity, Brave New Medicine. The Medicine of Flow is her second book.

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