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

Grace Cinnamongirl

Hi my name is Grace and I am from Atlanta, GA. I am currently a Freshman in high school. I have been writing short stories and poems since I was 7. I used to write historical fiction and romance novels and the genre of my most recent work is drama. I attended summer writing camps at Interlochen Center for the Arts while I was in middle school, and I took a journalism course this year. I published an article in the Chicago Weekly News paper in December of 2025 and I will start writing a column for the same paper later this year, and complete and internship there this summer.

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