Joanna Ho

Joanna Ho is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of many books for kids. She has received the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature Honor, a Golden Kite Award, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, and been finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

She is a writer and educator with a passion for anti-bias, anti-racism and equity work. She has a master’s from the Principal Leadership Institute at Berkeley and has been an English teacher, a dean, the designer of an alternative-to-prison program, a creator of educator professional development, and a high school vice principal.

She lives in the Bay Area, where she survives on homemade chocolate chip cookies, outdoor adventures, and dance parties with her kids. Keep your eyes open for more books to come!

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