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

Photo credit: Vishal Reddy

Ambika Vohra

Ambika Vohra is an Indian American writer living in San Francisco surrounded by tiny plants and big books. A Michigan native, she spent her childhood in pumpkin patches and cider mills. When not writing, she’s making Indian-style chai with concerning levels of cardamom pods. The Sticky Note Manifesto of Aisha Agarwal is her first novel.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Love +

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