Samantha Chong is a versatile cross-platform storyteller. Originally from Malaysia, she knits her multilingual and diverse backgrounds into every story she weaves. Her work has been published in BBC Travel, Gastro Obscura, OpenTable, and the Guggenheim. In Sam’s free time, you’ll find her eating her way through any city or losing track of time while falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes.
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.
Speaker – A Compass in the Wilderness: Poetry in the Age of Environmental Crisis
