Daniel Summerhill

Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet and essayist from Oakland, CA. He is the author of Divine, Divine, Divine and Mausoleum of Flowers. The inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County, Summerhill has earned fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Watering Hole and elsewhere. His work has been published widely, including venues such as The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Callaloo, The Indiana Review, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Winner of the 2023 Indiana Review 1/2K Prize and the inaugural Rumpus Prize for Nonfiction, Daniel is a Professor of Poetry at Santa Clara University and believes in the liberation of oppressed peoples everywhere, especially through the dissolution of empire.

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