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

Photo credit: Alice Sellers-Subocz

Bärí Williams

Bärí A. Williams is an attorney, start-up advisor, and DEI practitioner. She currently serves as an advisor to Vera AI and an attorney for several start-ups. Her primary practice areas include emerging technology transactions, privacy and data protection, IP licensing, and terms of service. She has bylines in The New York Times, WIRED, Fortune, and Fast Company. Her previous book, Diversity in the Workplace: Eye-Opening Interviews to Jumpstart Conversations about Identity, Privilege, and Bias, was published in March 2020

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Problematic Reports from the Frontlines of Tech

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