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

Katie Dorame

Katie Dorame is a Tongva artist of mixed ancestry–Indigenous and European American, born in Los Angeles, currently living and working in Oakland. Her work focuses on Indigenous representation, mythology, and Hollywood narratives. Dorame’s work has been exhibited at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles, the National Willa Cather Center in Nebraska, Form & Concept in Santa Fe, and the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College in New York, in addition to Slash Art, Anglim Trimble, Southern Exposure, Galería de la Raza, Guerrero Gallery, and the Thacher Gallery in San Francisco. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts and her BA from UCSC. See more of Katie’s work at katiedorame.com.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – Bite-Sized Biographies: Picture Books of Resistance and Resilience

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