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

Michael Mark Cohen

Michael Mark Cohen is Professor of Teaching in American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Conspiracy of Capital and his work has been published in American Quarterly, Gawker and Radical History Review. Since 2023 has been the director of the Banned Scholars Project which is funded by the Mellon and Spencer foundations to built solidarity among university professors in Black studies and other disciplines facing censorship and repression.

Where to find me at the festival
May 30, 2026 - Academic Free Speech

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