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

Photo credit: Lanny Nguyen Photography

Elaine Tai

Elaine Tai (she/her) is a librarian with strong interests in social justice and lifelong learning, and has been lucky to engage with wonderful authors, artists, activists, and others because of the reach of libraries. She is often motivated to create out of frustration, but also inspired and influenced by the community around her. She lives in the SF Bay Area with her curmudgeonly cat Neko and spends her free time as a wannabe-patron-of-the-arts, [very] amateur artist, and collector of things. Yes Means Yes is her first book.

2025 Family Day 

Moderator  – Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels

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