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

Photo credit: Ozan Ulucan

Kazu Haga

Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding core member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. He works with incarcerated people, youth, and activists from around the country. He has over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work and is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA, where he lives with his family. You can find out more about his work at www.kazuhaga.com.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World

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