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

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Aimee Phan

Aimee Phan was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the debut young adult fantasy novel The Lost Queen, and two books for adults, We Should Never Meet: Stories and the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. She has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Djerassi and Hedgebrook. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, USA Today and CNN.com among other publications. Aimee teaches as a professor in writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and resides in Berkeley, California with her family.

Where to find me at the festival
May 30, 2026 - Maps for Worlds Still Becoming: Experiments in Genre, Language, and Form

VIEW ALL OUR 2026 SPEAKERS

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