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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Kristina M Canales

Kristina M Canales (she/they) is a lifelong reader, writer, and gaymer. She is the founder of Queerthology – an online QTBIPOC book club – and loves to blur the border between horror and romance with her monster erotica. When not working their day job, you can find Kris facilitating Micro RPG games at Games of Berkeley and racking up their library holds. Kris lives on Ohlone Land.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Nightmares Revealed: The Rise of Latinx Horror Fiction

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Official Launch of the BABF Affinity Lit Collectives

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