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

Photo credit: Marissa Leshnov

Jeanne Carstensen

Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and Salon, and broadcast nationally on The World. She covered the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey. Jeanne has been awarded grants and fellowships from The Pulitzer Center, Logan Nonfiction Program, and Mesa Refuge, where she was the Peter Barnes Long-Form Journalism fellow. She lives in San Francisco.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – In Search of Sanctuary: Stories of Migration, Hardships and Hope

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