Susan Straight

SUSAN STRAIGHT has published nine novels, including Mecca, A Million Nightingales, and Highwire Moon, and one memoir, In the Country of Women. She’s been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Book Award, among other honors, and received the Lannan Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Edgar Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.

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