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

Photo credit: Gordon Allen

Emile Suotonye DeWeaver

Emile Suotonye DeWeaver is a formerly incarcerated activist, widely published essayist, owner of Re:Frame LLC, and a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. California’s Governor Brown commuted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Colorlines, The Appeal, The Rumpus, and Seventh Wave. The author of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine (The New Press), he lives in Oakland, California.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Ghosts of Justice: Exposing the Failures and Reimagining the Future of the American Legal System

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