Thank you so much for joining us at this years festival. Join us for the Merritt Dialogues on the 8 July.
Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2021-2022. Thompson is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette (2024). The recipient of multiple awards, Thompson serves on the Boards of Scripps College, The Poetry Foundation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the President of the Cave Canem Foundation.
Speaker – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures
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.
Speaker – A Compass in the Wilderness: Poetry in the Age of Environmental Crisis
