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

Calvin Williams

Over the past 20 years, Calvin Williams has been worldbuilding for liberation as a dynamic cultural strategist & social impact producer. He believes radical imagination activates our power to transform liberatory possibilities into irresistible realities. In 2018, he co-founded Wakanda Dream Lab, a creative agency that produces immersive storytelling campaigns as a vehicle for visions of Black Joy to emerge. In 2020, he edited “Memories of Abolition Day” a visionary fiction anthology reimagining a world after mass incarceration. In 2021, he joined Think Common Entertainment as the Senior Advisor for Social Impact to the award winning artist, actor, author and activist Common. He lives in Oakland with his wife Leila and son Malik.

Where to find me at the festival

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