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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Shobha Rao

Shobha Rao is the author of An Unrestored Woman, a short story collection, and the novels Girls Burn Brighter and Indian Country. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and was a Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School. Girls Burn Brighter has been translated into fifteen languages and was long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Goodreads Choice Awards. Indian Country is the winner of the 2025 Montana Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

Where to find me at the festival
May 31, 2026 - When the Past Comes Calling: Crime Fiction Across America’s Fault Lines

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