Elaine Hsieh Chou

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Described as “the funniest, most poignant novel of the year” by Vogue, her debut novel Disorientation was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist and Thurber Prize Finalist. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at New York University, her Pushcart Award–winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares and The Atlantic, while her essays appear in The Cut and Vanity Fair. She is a Fred R. Brown Literary Award recipient, a Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and a Gotham Series Creator to Watch. Her work has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Hedgebrook’s Writers-in-Residence Program.

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