Thank you so much for joining us at this years festival. Join us for the Merritt Dialogues on the 8 July. 

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Photo credit: Russell Jew

Adam Ryan Chang

Adam Ryan Chang was born and raised in San Francisco. Adam infuses his experience as a queer Asian American into his writings. Adam is the Executive Director of Oasis Legal Services, a California nonprofit supporting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. He is the proud adoptive parent of a Latine daughter. Adam graduated from the University of California in Davis with a degree in African Studies and completed law school at the University of Hawai`i in Mānoa.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Moving House, Moving Place, and Opening Our Minds

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