Jennifer James

Jennifer James, PhD, MSW, MSSP, is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Health & Aging, the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Bioethics Program at UCSF. Jen is a qualitative researcher and Black Feminist scholar who conducts community-engaged qualitative research on racism and health. She is a sociologist and empirical ethics researcher whose research interests include cancer, chronic illness, reproductive justice, patient-provider relationships, and health decision-making. Her current work is focused on experiences of health and illness for people who are or have been incarcerated. She holds a PhD in sociology from UCSF, a master’s in social work and a master’s of science in social policy from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in political science from Yale University.

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