Thank you so much for joining us at this years festival. Join us for the Merritt Dialogues on the 8 July.
Rhea Joseph is a poet, curator, and event producer who comes from a family of artists and entrepreneurs. She is the co-creator of the monthly series Poolside Poets at the Phoenix Hotel and a founding member of Decentered Arts, a non-profit dedicated to building community through art of all mediums. She is currently working on her first book of poems.
Speaker – How to Find (& Create) Your Writing Community
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
