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

Caro De Robertis

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of six novels, including The Palace of ErosCantoras, and more.Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have receive numerous honors, including two Stonewall Book Awards and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary writer to receive. De Robertis is also an award-winning literary translator and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California with their two children.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

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