Thank you so much for joining us at this years festival. Join us for the Merritt Dialogues on the 8 July.
Debbie Gibbons is the District Teacher Librarian for the Oakland Unified School District. She has 30+ years of experience in education, serving the students of Oakland as a classroom teacher, computer lab teacher, and school librarian. Outside of the library, she enjoys walking her dog Mayzie, swimming with friends, and baking Asian cookies.
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
