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

Instagram Youtube Facebook
DONATE
VOLUNTEER
Photo credit: Michelle Chouinard

Michelle Chouinard

Michelle Chouinard is the author of the Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco mysteries, and under another name, the USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of nine previous mysteries. Michelle has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Stanford University and was one of UC Merced’s founding faculty members. She lives in the Bay Area and enjoys caffeine in all forms, amateur genealogy, baking, and anything to do with Halloween or the zombie apocalypse.

2025 Inside Ideas

Speaker  – Murder in Mysterious Places

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