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

Justine Villanueva

Justine Eva Li Villanueva traces her ancestral roots to Bukidnon, home of her paternal grandmother, Felipa Okit Apoong, of the Bukidnon tribe. She was raised in Malaybalay until she immigrated to the United States when she was sixteen years old. She is learning to belong in Davis, California, the Wintun-Patwin homeland, with her husband and two children. Justine’s creative work focuses on decolonization, indigenization, and social justice. JustineVillanueva.com

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – movement with Justine Villanueva

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