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

Photo credit: Michael Colgan

Yaffa AS

Mx. Yaffa is a an author and storyteller that paves the way for us to imagine utopia through every word. Having shared their story with over 300,000 audience members at speaking events globally.

Mx. Yaffa is an acclaimed disabled, autistic, trans, queer, Muslim, and indigenous Palestinian individual who has received multiple awards for their transformative work around displacement, decolonization, equity, and centering the lived experiences of individuals most impacted by injustice.

Mx. Yaffa is the Executive Director of Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), as well as the founder of several non-profits and community projects.

Mx. Yaffa is an engineer, death and birthing doula, peer support specialist, consultant, and artist.

2025 Bookworm Blockparty

Speaker  – Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

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