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

Photo credit: Lucas Passmore

Seema Yasmin

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, standup comedian, and poet. A queer, Gujarati-Muslim writer and director, she is a fiction fellow of the Kundiman and Tin House workshops, and a playwright at Soho Theatre in London. She is the author of eight books for adults and children, including: Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins, 2021), The ABCs of Queer History (Hachette, 2024), and the poetry collection, If God is a Virus (Haymarket, 2021). Her forthcoming titles include the picture book Inshallah, the middle grade series Muslim Mavericks, and the YA novel The Voices (all Simon and Schuster, 2026/27). Seema trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge, in journalism at the University of Toronto, and in clown at The Clown School in Los Angeles. She served as a disease detective in the U.S. government’s Epidemic Intelligence Service where she investigated outbreaks, and as a medical analyst for CNN from 2014-2021 where she reported on outbreaks of Ebola, Zika and Covid. She is director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University where she studies the spread of anti-science disinformation, and teaches storytelling. Seema is adapting her debut young adult novel, Unbecoming (Simon and Schuster, 2024), for the screen, and is at work on her second young adult novel which is a climate-djinn horror story. She lives in Las Vegas.

2025 Family Day 

Speaker  – All Bodies All Selves

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