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

Lauren Davis

Lauren Davis almost became a lawyer but found that her love of research and sharing weird facts was better suited to comics. After receiving her JD from the Georgetown University Law Center, Lauren wrote for several years at the speculative fiction blog io9 and eventually got her MFA in comics at the California College of the Arts. In addition to making comics, Lauren is a teaching artist and a longtime organizer of San Francisco Zine Fest. Along with Mel Hilario and Katie Longua, Lauren is part of Triple Dream Comics, creators of the graphic novels “Debian Perl, Digital Detective” and “Agent Cupcake”, as well as the Eisner-nominated short comic story “Trickster, Traitor, Dummy, Doll.”

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