Daniel Olivas

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of 13 books including Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (University of New Mexico Press, 2025), Chicano Frankenstein: A Novel (Forest Avenue Press, 2024), and Crossing the Border: Collected Poems (Pact Press, 2017). Widely anthologized, Olivas has written on literature for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, Zocálo, Latino Book Review, Alta Journal, Literary Hub, and The Guardian. He earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA. By day, Olivas is a senior attorney with the California Department of Justice specializing in land use, environmental enforcement, and affordable housing.

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