Michelle Ruiz Keil

Michelle Ruiz Keil is a playwright and author. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, All Of Us With Wings, called “…a transcendent journey” by The New York Times Book Review, was a Book of The Month Club selection. Her sophomore novel, Summer In The City of Roses, was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le. Guin Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been most recently published by the Buckmxn Journal and the anthology Dispatches from Anarres.

She is a winner of the 2025 Miller Spark Award, a 2021 Tin House Scholar, and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born and raised bookish in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michelle has lived in with her family in Portland, Oregon for many years.

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