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

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Amanda Hawkins

Amanda Hawkins’ first book of poetry, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones, was published by Wandering Aengus Press in January 2025. Their work has been nominated for three Pushcart prizes, listed as honorable mention, semi-finalist, and finalist for various contests and awards, and won the Scotti Merrill Award from Key West Literary Seminar, the Editors’ Prize for Poetry at The Florida Review, and the Wandering Aengus Book Prize. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Boston ReviewThe Cincinnati ReviewHoney Literary,Massachusetts ReviewThe Orison AnthologyOrionThe RumpusThe Southampton ReviewTerrainTin House, and Image, among others.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Chimera Space: Monstrous, Lovely, and Liminal

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