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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Marian Urquilla

Marian Urquilla’s creative work explores the intersections of exile, spirituality, and identity. Her poems have appeared in The Acentos Review, The Indianapolis Review, West Trestle, and the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. She is the winner of the 2025 Writing Salon Jane Underwood Prize and Midway Journal’s Flash Prose and Poetry Contest, a finalist for the 2024 Stephen Dunn Prize at Solstice Literary Magazine, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Wound is the Portal: Healing into the Future

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