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

Peggy Lee

Peggy Lee is one of the founding members and the current Director of The Ruby, since 2022. They love San Francisco and The Ruby is their love letter to the arts and culture that make the Bay Area a truly special place. The Ruby is a sanctuary for curious and open minded people to explore and grow. They’ve worked locally and globally on programs addressing HIV/AIDS, family planning, mental health, child nutrition, women’s health, and substance abuse throughout Asia, Africa, and the US. They also created Made By Girls, a national program to build stem confidence in girls ages 8-17 spanning 18 locations in the US and Canada. They have Bachelor of Arts in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and a Masters of Science in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.

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