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

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Photo credit: Photo courtesy of Abrams ComicArts

Josh Tuininga

Josh Tuininga is an author, artist, and graphic designer based in North Bend, WA. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tuininga’s artistic career has explored a variety of mediums including sequential art, animation, painting and design. In 2003, he founded an Art + Design Agency, The Medium where he continues to work as Creative Director.

Josh is the author of ‘We Are Not Strangers’ (Abrams ComicArts 2023), and two children’s books, Why Blue? & Dream On.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Drawn to Justice: Graphic Novels and the Power of Social Action

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