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

Matthew Smith

Matthew is the co-founder and director of operations for Reflection Press, a POC, queer, and trans-owned independent publishing house based in San Francisco since 2009. The press integrates holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for both children and adults. With over 15 years of experience in the independent publishing industry, often on the fringes, Matthew is continually finding new ways to build resilience and adapt in the face of challenges like book bans and shifting cultural landscapes. As coauthor of They She He Me: Free to Be! and the banned book They, She, He Easy as ABC, Matthew collaborates with Maya Gonzalez to create expansive and impactful materials and resources supporting Maya’s Gender Wheel Approach—a nature-based, decolonized, and holistic approach to body, gender, and relationship diversity.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Storming the Gatekeepers: Past, Present, & Future Publishing Alternatives

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