Shafaq Khan

Shafaq Khan is a mom and lawyer. Born to Pakistani parents, she grew up in a small port city in Saudi Arabia, along the Persian Gulf, called Jubail Industrial City—a city that barely makes it onto most maps but would shape her worldview, cementing her identity as a third-culture kid.

Shafaq attended college in New York City, majoring in political science and Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures, before heading to law school. She worked for nearly a decade as a legal services attorney, representing low-income people with disabilities facing eviction and benefits issues.Through this experience, Shafaq became acquainted with people’s stories—the ones we tell and the ones we don’t—and learned to listen to the stories beneath the surface.

Shafaq lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

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