Giovanna Lomanto

Giovanna Lomanto is a Pushcart-Prize nominated poet and artist. She has published two poetry collections with small presses. A recent graduate of NYU’s MFA program, her work has been supported by U.C. Berkeley, KQED, and the SFMOMA archive. She currently works at a homeless shelter and also is the lead curator for the San Francisco Literary Festival’s Out Loud weekend for Queer & BIPOC writers. Currently, she serves as the co-owner of the indie press Game Over Books. She lives in Oakland with her partner and their lion head bunny Maggie.

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