Vanessa Grubbs

Dr. Vanessa Grubbs is a double board-certified nephrologist and internist, published author, activist, and kidney donor. She is currently a primary care provider and director of adult medicine at Baywell Health, a federally qualified health center dedicated to being the trusted hub advancing the dignity and health of the Bay Area’s Black communities. She is also the founder & president of Black Doc Village, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing the inequitable dismissal of Black resident physicians through research and policy change. Her first book, Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor’s Search for the Perfect Match (Amistad, 2017) tells her story of becoming a kidney donor, then nephrologist, and her experiences with ethical and controversial topics in nephrology. Her new book, Negligent by Design: Anti-Blackness in American Medicine and How to Address It, will be published in Fall 2025 by North Atlantic Books.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Bridging the Gaps: Redefining Healthcare Through a Justice Lens

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