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

Laurie R. King

Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of seventeen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and many acclaimed standalone novels such as Folly, Touchstone, The Bones of Paris, and Lockdown. Her latest novel is Back to the Garden. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues

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