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

Meera Sriram

Meera Sriram draws from her life straddling the East and West to tell stories. She is an award-winning author of several picture books including A GIFT FOR AMMA, DUMPLING DAY, A GARDEN IN MY HANDS, and THE SPICE BOX. Her books have been selected Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal, Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), and Bank Street College, and have received starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. She’s a two-time recipient of the South Asia Book Award. Her work has been included in several state reading lists, featured in The New York Times, and has been translated into many different languages. Meera loves woodsy hikes and urban murals, and lives with her family in Berkeley, California. For more information, please visit: http://www.meerasriram.com

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