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

Elizabeth Stark

Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press, finalist for Lamda Literary and Ferro-Grumely Awards), host of Story Makers Podcast (StoryMakersShow.com), co-director and co-writer of films FtF: Female to Femme, a creative documentary, and Little Mutinies, a short (both distributed by Frameline), and producer of the award-winning feature film Lost in the Middle. She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing and has taught at the Pratt Institute, UCSC, St. Mary’s, as visiting distinguished writer, and elsewhere. She co-directs and teaches at BookWritingWorld.com.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – A Revolution of Raised Voices

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