Jósa Goodlife

Jósa Goodlife is an Icelandic author, multifaceted artist, and healing guide living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut book, Elemental Rebirth, is a poetic healing memoir born from her lived experience with cancer—an intimate passage of realignment through womanhood, identity loss, and existential inquiry. Rooted in a life devoted to yoga, sound, and creative expression, her writing listens both backward and forward, honoring ancient elemental wisdom and reconciliation while planting seeds for a more earth-conscious, awakened future. With a voice both intimate and spacious, Jósa opens doorways where transformation becomes possible through fully felt experience, and where the essence of who we truly are is given space to emerge and be expressed.

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