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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Laleh Khadivi

Laleh Khadivi is the author of The Kurdish Trilogy which includes The Age of Orphans (2009), The Walking (2013), and A Good Country (2017), a New York Times Editors Choice.

Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, among others.

Her new novel, Female Life on Planet Earth (Ecco Harper Collins) and its sister community film project, Female Lives on Planet Earth, debut in September of 2026.

Where to find me at the festival
May 30, 2026 - Writers on Process – Open Book

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