Maia Kobabe

MAIA KOBABE is an author and illustrator from the Bay Area, California. This is eir first book for middle-grade readers. E is also the author of two books for young adults. Gender Queer: A Memoir won a Stonewall Honor and an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020 and was also the most challenged book in the US in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding was created with Dr. Sarah Peitzmeier. When not drawing or writing, Maia is usually listening to K-pop music, practicing Taekwondo, studying Spanish, or picking up books from the library

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