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

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera is an award-winning novelist. Her debut, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region and was short-listed for the DSC Prize and Man Asia Prizes. It was chosen as a Target Book Club book. Her second novel What Lies Between Us, won the Sri Lankan National Book Award and was short-listed for the Northern California Book Prize. The Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful-reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.”  She is proud of all her writing students from various MFAs and in her Writing Covens.

2025 Inside Ideas

Moderator  – So Many Stars: A Celebration of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

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