Festival Authors, Moderators, and Presenters

2026 Featured Authors & Moderators

Alison Bechdel

Cartoonist and author of the bestselling graphic memoir Fun Home and the comic, quasi-autobiographical novel Spent

  • Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008, was a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all over the planet. Ms. magazine called it “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” Fascinated by the collision of politics and private life, she examines how people get along—or don’t—with the wider world. Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, about her fraught relationship with her closeted father, was included in the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. It was adapted for the stage in 2015 and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Her latest book, Spent, is a comical work of autofiction about a cartoonist named Alison who runs a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont. “After spending so many years working very hard to write the precise truth about my life,” Bechdel said in an interview, “it was just a blast to make shit up.”


Judy Blume

Legendary author of Forever, Tiger Eyes, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and other books that got us through young adulthood

  • Judy Blume has been hailed as “the poet laureate of puberty” and “the patron saint of preteen girls,” but in truth, we never outgrow her. Her formative classics, including Forever, Tiger Eyes, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, so profoundly impress young readers that they pass the books to their own children decades later. Blume is a longtime champion of intellectual freedom, working to support teachers and librarians in their fight against book bans. Her activism, along with her many bestselling books for young readers and adults, have earned her many honors, including a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. A Peabody Award–winning documentary, Judy Blume Forever, and a motion picture based on Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret are available to stream. In 2016 Blume and her husband, George Cooper, founded an independent, nonprofit bookstore in their hometown of Key West, Florida. Blume can be found working there several days a week.

Peter Stark

Bestselling author of historical narratives about the settling of America, including Astoria, Young Washington, and Gallop Toward the Sun

  • Peter Stark is an adventure writer and historian who has reported from some of the world’s most remote places. Many of his stories are illuminating accounts of early American explorers and their contact with Indigenous peoples. His book Astoria, which tells the story of Thomas Jefferson and John Jacob Astor’s attempt to establish a colony on America’s unexplored West Coast, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for a PEN USA Literary Award for nonfiction. His other books include Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father, which wasa finalist for the George Washington Book Prize; Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation; and Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance. His latest book is The Lost Cities of El Norte.

Jason De León

National Book Award–winning author of Soldiers and Kings, about his time spent embedded with smugglers guiding migrants across the U.S.–Mexico border

  • Jason De León began his career as an archaeologist studying ancient tools in Mexico. During the course of his fieldwork, he met many people who shared their often harrowing stories of migration. Inspired by these conversations, he began to chronicle how poverty, violence, political instability, and climate change shape and fuel our current migrant crisis. In 2017, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his work shedding light on the complexity of migration and U.S. immigration policies. His book Soldiers and Kings, an up-close look at the daily lives of those charged with getting people past immigration security forces, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the best books of 2024 by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Time. De León is also the director of the Undocumented Migration Project, which raises awareness about border issues and helps reunite families with loved ones who have disappeared while migrating.

Kirk Ellis

Emmy Award–winning screenwriter of the limited television series John Adams, Franklin, and Anne Frank: The Whole Story

  • A master of bringing history to life onscreen, Kirk Ellis has received more than fifty Emmy nominations and awards. He won two Emmys, a Writers Guild Award (WGA), a Peabody, and the Humanitas Prize for his work as writer and co–executive producer of the acclaimed 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams. Previously, he received an Emmy nomination, the WGA Award, and the Humanitas Prize for the ABC miniseries Anne Frank: The Whole Story, which he wrote and co-produced. Most recently, Ellis wrote and executive-produced the Apple TV+ limited series Franklin, starring Michael Douglas, which chronicles Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to negotiate a treaty with France at the height of the American Revolution. His newest book, They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution, and America’s Obsession with Guns and Outlaws, was published in February.

Lauren Groff

National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies, Matrix, The Vaster Wilds, and the new story collection Brawler

  • Called “one of our finest living writers” by someone who would know—Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Hernán Díaz—Lauren Groff moves adroitly from short stories to novels and from the historical to the contemporary. Her novel Fates and Furies, which examines a modern-day marriage from the perspectives of both the husband and the wife, was a finalist for the National Book Award and Barack Obama’s favorite book of 2015. Her short story collection Florida was also a National Book Award finalist, as was Matrix, her stunning novel about a twelfth-century woman who oversees a powerful English convent. Groff’s latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, a tale of wilderness survival set in the early days of colonial America, was an instant New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of 2023 by NPR, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and, again, Barack Obama. Groff’s latest book, the story collection Brawler, was published in February 2026.

Carl Hiaasen

Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Fever Beach, Strip Tease, Bad Monkey, and other savagely funny novels about people behaving badly

  • Carl Hiaasen famously said, “There’s nothing you can invent in a Florida novel that won’t eventually come true here.” His irreverently comic bestsellers, including Strip Tease, Sick Puppy, Stormy Weather, and Squeeze Me, hold up a mirror to the corruption and environmental degradation taking place in his beloved home state, and his flamboyantly ignorant villains bear more than a striking resemblance to real-life bad actors who make the news each day. Hiaasen draws much of his material from his years spent as a columnist for the Miami Herald, work that earned him three Pulitzer nominations. The London Observer has called him “America’s finest satirical novelist,” and he has received numerous honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Hiaasen is also the author of bestselling books for young readers, including Hoot, Flush, and Scat. His latest novel, released earlier this year, is Fever Beach.

Brandon Hobson

National Book Award finalist and author of the novels Where the Dead Sit Talking, The Removed, and The Devil Is a Southpaw

  • Brandon Hobson’s work is most remarkable for what it doesn’t say. Full of the silences, unanswered questions, and unresolved problems that make up real life, his stories are powerfully authentic, and his characters are relatably flawed. “I like ambiguity because much of the world is ambiguous,” he said in an interview with Tin House. “What’s not spoken is often more interesting than what is said.” His novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, a beautiful but raw coming-of-age story about a boy thrust into the Native American foster care system, was a 2018 National Book Award finalist and was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Prize. His novel The Removed, about a murder that haunts a Cherokee family, was named one of the best books of 2021 by Time, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly. Hobson’s latest novel, The Devil Is a Southpaw, was published in October 2025.

Mira Jacob

Writer, illustrator, cultural critic, and author of the graphic memoir Good Talk and the novelThe Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

  • In 2015, Mira Jacob wrote a graphic article for BuzzFeed titled “37 Difficult Questions from My Mixed-Race Son,” which quickly went viral. Her 2019 graphic memoir Good Talk expands on these delicate and nuanced conversations about race and politics. It was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award, and named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. Good Talk is currently in development as a television series. Her 2014 debut novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and described by The Boston Globe as “beautifully wrought, frequently funny, [and] gently heartbreaking.” Jacob is also the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series, in Brooklyn, which hosts readings and discussions with literary authors and poets.

Priyanka Kumar

Naturalist, filmmaker, and acclaimed author of Conversations with Birds and The Light Between Apple Trees

  • Priyanka Kumar profoundly reenvisions our place in nature and nature’s place in our hearts. Her essay collection Conversations with Birds was described by Psychology Today as a “landmark” book that “could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls.” Her latest work, The Light Between Apple Trees, weaves together science, childhood memories, and the cultural history of one of the world’s most popular and mythic fruits. Kumar is also the author of the novel Take Wing and Fly Here, and her documentary film The Song of the Little Road, about the life and art of the legendary Indian director Satyajit Ray, is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Her forthcoming book The Grassland Queen will be published in fall 2026.

James McBride

National Book Award–winning author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, The Good Lord Bird, and the acclaimed memoir The Color of Water

  • A virtuoso in two genres, James McBride has won both the National Book Award (for his novel The Good Lord Bird) and the Stephen Sondheim Award (for his musical Bobos). His latest novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, the bighearted tale of a tight-knit and diverse Pennsylvania neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s, won the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. His novel Miracle at St. Anna was adapted into a 2008 film by Spike Lee, and his memoir The Color of Water is considered a modern-day classic. As a noted musician and composer, McBride has toured with jazz legend Jimmy Scott and written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., and even the purple dinosaur Barney (though he cannot claim the earworm theme song “I Love You”).

Kiese Laymon

Bestselling novelist, essayist, and author of the poignantly honest and frequently comical memoir Heavy

  • In his observant, often hilarious work, Kiese Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness define his memoir Heavy, which won a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years and one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. The audio edition, read by the author, was named Audible’s 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Kirkus Reviews called it “a dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways.” Laymon is also the author of the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and the acclaimed novel Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award and is being adapted into a television series by Trevor Noah. His latest book, for young readers, is City Summer, Country Summer.

Rebecca Solnit

Writer, activist, and bestselling author of Orwell’s Roses, Men Explain Things to Me, and the new essay collection The Beginning Comes After the End

  • In its review of No Straight Road Takes You There, her latest essay collection, The Guardian wrote that Rebecca Solnit “is like a seasoned boxing coach tending to the spiritually and politically exhausted citizen flopped in the corner. She mops our brows and offers us motivation.” In her many acclaimed books on feminism, politics, the environment, activism, and the arts, Solnit calls out humankind’s misdeeds while also offering reasons for hope. Above all, she shares her insatiable curiosity and interest in seemingly everything. Wanderlust is a cultural history of walking. Orwell’s Roses, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, is a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener as well as an antifascist. Men Explain Things to Me inspired the scathingly funny term “mansplaining.” The list goes on, including River of Shadows, about California’s rise as a film and tech hub, which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, was published in March.

Colm Tóibín

Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author of Brooklyn, Nora Webster, Long Island, and other quietly exquisite novels

  • Colm Tóibín grew up in a home where, he once said, there was “a great deal of silence.” He has since made a career of talking to the world through his beautiful prose. His novel Brooklyn tells the unforgettable story of a young Irish immigrant navigating life and romantic love in early 1950s New York. It was named one of The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan. Tóibín’s latest book, Long Island, picks up where Brooklyn left off, reuniting us with his beloved and complicated heroine. It was named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time. Tóibín’s novel The Blackwater Lightship was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Master, a fictional account of the inner life of the American author Henry James, won the International Dublin Literary Award.

Ocean Vuong

National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and The Emperor of Gladness

  • Ocean Vuong exploded onto the literary scene in 2016 with his first book of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, only the second debut collection to win the T.S. Eliot Prize. His 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a shattering story of family, first love, and what it means to be an American. It won the American Book Award, the Mark Twain American Voice Award, and the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a troubled college dropout and the elderly widow who welcomes him into her home. It was an instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and The Guardian called it “heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time.” In 2019, Vuong was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the youngest recipient that year.

Isabel Wilkerson

Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste, considered modern classics of narrative nonfiction

  • Widely considered one of the most important nonfiction writers of our time, Isabel Wilkerson explores the universal human story of migration and reinvention and the unseen hierarchies that have divided us as a nation. In 1994, as Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, she became the first Black American journalist to win the Pulitzer Prize for individual reporting. Then came The Warmth of Other Suns, her 2010 book about the Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is now in the modern nonfiction canon. Wilkerson followed it with the bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and named the No. 1 nonfiction book of 2020 by Time. The New York Times called it “a book that changes the weather inside a reader.”

Ada Limón

Former U.S. poet laureate, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and National Book Award finalist

  • Ada Limón served as U.S. poet laureate from 2022 to 2025. She has won a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and countless literary awards and was one of Time’s 2024 Women of the Year. “Despite all of this,” cracked The New York Times, “she’s a very fine poet.” Her seven books of poetry include The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Known for her thoughtful observations of the natural world, Limón was invited by NASA to write a poem to commemorate one of its missions. That poem, “In Praise of Mystery,” is etched on a space probe now making its way toward Jupiter and was adapted into a children’s book illustrated by Caldecott Medal finalist Peter Sís. Limón’s latest collection, Startlement, was published in fall 2025. Her next book, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, comes out in April.

Marin Sardy

Author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day, about her family’s legacy of mental illness

  • Marin Sardy is the author of the 2019 memoir The Edge of Every Day, which The Wall Street Journal called “one of the very few books … to capture a sense of the sheer agonizing helplessness one feels in seeing a family member robbed by mental disease.” The memoir informed her essay “Caregiving,” which won the 2025 Mathiasen Prose Award. Sardy is the co-creator of the Substack Psychic Telephone, which explores the lives of psychics and mediums and the connections between people across distance and time. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and two award-winning photography books. Sardy has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and has made the Best American Essays Notable list multiple times. She teaches memoir and personal essay writing for Writing Workshops and Authors Publish.

Caroline Fraser

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the Laura Ingalls Wilder biography Prairie Fires and Murderland, about serial killers in the era of runaway industrial pollution

  • Caroline Fraser writes about people and institutions that are deeply embedded in America’s cultural psyche. Her first book, God’s Perfect Child, traces the growth and eventual diminishment of her childhood religion, Christian Science. Prairie Fires, the first comprehensive biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, examines how the author of the beloved Little House books transformed the harsh reality of pioneer life into an upbeat myth of self-reliance. It won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. Fraser’s latest book, Murderland, is a multilayered history of the spate of serial killings that took place in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, particularly in Fraser’s native Pacific Northwest, and possible links to toxic waste sites. The New Yorker called it “an extraordinarily well-written and genre-defying blend of memoir, social and environmental history, and forensic inquest,” and it won the 2026 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime.

Craig Johnson

New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels

  • Craig Johnson’s laconic hero, Sheriff Walt Longmire, was already beloved before Netflix made him a TV icon. The Longmire books, which follow the travails of the Wyoming lawman, have won numerous honors, including the Western Writers of America’s Owen Wister Award and multiple Will Rogers Medallion Awards. The Dark Horse was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2009, and Hell Is Empty was Library Journal’s Best Mystery of 2011. The Longmire Netflix series, which ran from 2012 to 2017, was praised by The Wall Street Journal as “the best of two worlds: a modern crime drama with dry wit and sometimes heart-wrenching emotion that’s also got a glorious setting under the big sky of Wyoming.” In 2024, the Longmire installment Spirit of Steamboat was selected by the Wyoming State Library as the inaugural One Book Wyoming selection.

Mariah Blake

Investigative journalist and author of the gripping debut book They Poisoned the World

  • Mariah Blake’s new book, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, tells the infuriating story of how “forever chemicals” have made their way into everything from drinking water to children’s clothing, despite the known health risks. Blake traces the history of these poisonous substances and how both the U.S. government and companies such as DuPont and 3M downplayed or outright denied the danger. She also chronicles the heartbreaking impact of forever chemicals on one upstate New York town located near factories producing Teflon. The Washington Post called They Poisoned the World “riveting and horrifying ... a book that none of us can afford to miss.” Blake’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The New Republic, and she was a fellow at the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard University.

Henry Shukman

 Poet, author, meditation teacher and co-founder of the single-path meditation app The Way

  • Henry Shukman is a poet, author, meditation teacher and co-founder of the single-path meditation app The Way. His most recent books are Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening (HarperOne) and the Zen memoir One Blade of Grass. He has taught at Google, the New York Times, Harvard Business School and Medical School, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has written several award-winning and bestselling books of fiction and poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Guardian, Times and Sunday Times. He has an M.A. from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews.


Deborah Jackson Taffa

National Book Award finalist and author of the acclaimed coming-of-age memoir Whiskey Tender

  • DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA is director of the MFA program in creative writing at the renowned Institute of American Indian Arts and a hometown treasure here in Santa Fe. Her memoir Whiskey Tender, about growing up as a mixed-tribe Native American torn by the pressures of assimilation, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award and was named a best new book by The New Yorker and Oprah Daily. The Washington Post praised Whiskey Tender for its “mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and its excavation of a particular place and time”—that being New Mexico’s Navajo territory in the 1970s and ’80s. Taffa is a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is also editor in chief of the literary magazine River Styx.

Hakim Bellamy

Cultural activist, National Poetry Slam champion, and Albuquerque’s first poet laureate

  • Hakim Bellamy is the quintessential citizen poet. He was Albuquerque’s first poet laureate and served as deputy director of the city’s Department of Arts & Culture. “Poetry is community,” he has said. “When we start talking and listening to each other, becoming aware of one another, and ultimately are forced to acknowledge and perceive each other, we have a relationship.” Bellamy is a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network fellow, and a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellow. His first poetry collection, Swear, won the 2012 Working Class Studies Association Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing. His 2019 book We Are Neighbors, a collaboration with photographer Justin Thor Simenson, was short-listed for the New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards. A National Poetry Slam champion, Bellamy has performed around the world and continues to use his art to build community. His latest collection is Commissions y Corridos.

JJ Amaworo Wilson

Award-winning novelist, playwright, and essayist

  • JJ AMAWORO WILSON is a German-born Anglo-Nigerian-American writer. His 2016 novel Damnificados, loosely based on the real-life occupation of an abandoned skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, tells the story of the vagabonds and misfits of a dystopian society who set up their own community, complete with schools, shops, and a ragtag militia. The book won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Fiction. It was also named a top ten book in O, The Oprah Magazine. His second novel, Nazaré, won the 2021 Foreword INDIES Editor’s Choice Prize and the Independent Publisher Book Award. Wilson’s short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and his plays have been produced on four continents, most recently in Gaza. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University, in Silver City.

Roshi Joan Halifax

Buddhist teacher, social and environmental activist, and author

  • ROSHI JOAN HALIFAX is a Buddhist teacher, social activist, and author, and the founder and head teacher of Upaya Zen Center, in Santa Fe. She has received many awards and honors from institutions around the world for her work as a social and environmental activist and in the end-of-life care field. She is director of the Project on Being with Dying and founder of the Upaya Prison Project, which develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is also founder of the Nomads Clinic, in Nepal. Her books include The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice; A Buddhist Life in America: Simplicity in the Complex, Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Wisdom in the Presence of Death, and Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet. Her latest release is the children’s book Sophie Learns to Be Brave.

Kathleen McCleery

Award-winning broadcast journalist

  • KATHLEEN McCLEERY is an award-winning broadcast journalist who has worked for NBC and PBS, where she served as deputy executive producer of the PBS News Hour. Since moving to New Mexico, she has reported and produced stories for that program on a wide variety of topics, including politics, the environment, education, science, health care, and the arts. McCleery taught journalism at her alma mater, Princeton University, in 2016 and 2018, focusing on media coverage of U.S. elections. As a student at Princeton, she was the first female news director of the local public radio affiliate, WPRB FM.

Laura Paskus

Acclaimed environmental journalist and author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate

  • Laura Paskus reports on the most pressing environmental issues of our time, including climate change, water use, and industrial pollution. She is the author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate, which Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert described as “deeply reported and vividly written” and “an important contribution to the literature of our reckless age.” For eight seasons, Paskus hosted and produced the New Mexico PBS series Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future, and she is editor of the essay and poetry collection Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth. Paskus teaches journalism and communications at the University of New Mexico and is working on a new project about the future of New Mexico’s rivers.

Jake Skeets

Navajo Nation poet laureate and author of the collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

  • Jake Skeets is the third poet laureate of the Navajo Nation and will hold the position through 2027. His 2019 debut poetry collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, won the American Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Whiting Award, and the National Poetry Series award. The Harvard Review captured the book’s haunting power: “A strange and uncanny poetic landscape emerges, one in which a dead cactus conceals a burrowing owl, where wild rose and sego lily lead us to a noisy truck radio.” Skeets’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review, and he was the 2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is also an NEA Grant for Arts Projects recipient and an ASU/Mellon Foundation Projecting All Voices fellow. His latest collection, Horses, was published in March.

DezBaa'

Screenwriter and actor on the award-winning television series Dark Winds

  • DezBaa' began her career in the New Mexico film industry as a background actor but soon landed speaking roles—first in the 2017 film Woman Walks Ahead, starring Jessica Chastain, then in other projects featuring Julianne Moore, Michael Shannon, and Christian Bale. For three seasons she co-starred in the acclaimed AMC series Dark Winds, based on Tony Hillerman’s beloved Leaphorn & Chee novels, and was one of the show’s staff writers. She is of Diné, Basque, Spanish, and Mexican descent and formerly worked for the Navajo Nation’s Division of Natural Resources. She holds degrees in screenwriting and creative nonfiction from Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts.

Leah Ollman

Art historian and critic

  • Leah Ollman has been writing about art for more than thirty-five years. Her work appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times and Art in America, as well as in Photograph, The Brooklyn Rail, Paris Review Daily, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, ARTnews, American Craft, and many other publications. She has written essays for books on some of today’s most renowned artists and photographers, including William Kentridge, Alison Rossiter, Julie Blackmon, Michael Light, Chris McCaw, Klea McKenna, and Michal Chelbin, and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs. From 2018 to 2023 she served as a judge for the James Beard Foundation Media Awards. Ollman is the editor of the recent collection Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography, which PhotoBook Journal says “reads like a gallery of language, where each page frames a moment worth returning to.”

Ama Codjoe

Award-winning poet and author of the collections Bluest Nude and Blood of the Air

  • Ama Codjoe is the author of the poetry collection Bluest Nude, which former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón described as “pulsating with both grief and beauty.” It won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her collection Blood of the Air won the 2020 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronx Council on the Arts and was the 2023 poet in residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She won the 2023 Whiting Award and the 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Rick Barot

National Book Award finalist and author of the poetry collections The Galleons and Moving the Bones

  • Rick Barot’s work examines the personal within larger historical contexts, such as colonialism and the immigrant experience. His 2020 collection The Galleons, which pays homage to his Filipino American family, was long-listed for the National Book Award and named one of the New York Public Library’s best books of the year. His collection Chord won the PEN Open Book Award and the University of North Texas Rilke Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. McSweeney’s described his latest book of poems, Moving the Bones, as “the work of a consummate artist at the height of his powers.”

Danny Rubin

Award-winning screenwriter of Groundhog Day and Hear No Evil

  • Danny Rubin began his career in improv in Chicago before making the switch to screenwriting. He co-wrote, with Harold Ramis, the iconic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, which won the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay and the London Film Critics’ Circle Award for Screenwriter of the Year. He also co-wrote the screenplays for Hear No Evil and S.F.W. His stage adaptation of Groundhog Day won the 2017 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical and received seven Tony nominations. Rubin has taught screenwriting throughout the United States and internationally, and from 2008 to 2013 he served as the first Briggs-Copeland lecturer on screenwriting at Harvard University.

Jonah Willihnganz

Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project

  • Jonah Willihnganz is the director of the Stanford Storytelling Project, an arts program that explores how storytelling can be used to create personal and social change, partly through podcasts like State of the Human.. “We equip students in using story practices to help them meet the world creatively and compassionately,” he has said. His research focuses on how storytelling can promote courage and empathy, and it informs his work as co-founder of the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning at Stanford’s School of Medicine. Willihnganz also co-leads Stanford’s Dalai Lama Fellowship program, which helps students develop skills to bring about social change. A longtime student of aikido, he incorporates its philosophy of nonviolence and self-awareness into many of his courses.

Sarah Weinman

New York Times book critic and author of The Real Lolita and Without Consent

  • Sarah Weinman writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for The New York Times and is the author of three books: Without Consent, hailed by Bustle as “a searing, thoroughly researched examination of misogyny in past and present American culture”; Scoundrel, named one of the best books of 2022 by Time, Esquire, and NPR; and The Real Lolita, which won the 2019 Crime Writers of Canada Award in Nonfiction and was named among the best of the year by NPR, BuzzFeed, the San Francisco Chronicle, and New York magazine. Weinman was a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award for Reporting and has won fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her Crime Lady newsletter covers crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between.

Scott Simon

Emmy and Peabody Award–winning host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday 

  • Scott Simonis one of America’s most admired writers and broadcasters. He is the longtime host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, which The Washington Post has called “the most literate, witty, moving, and just plain interesting news show on any dial.” He has reported from all fifty states, five continents, and ten wars, from El Salvador to Afghanistan to Iraq. His nonfiction books include the memoirs Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime; Home and Away: Memoirs of a Fan; and Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other. He is also the author of the novels Pretty Birds and Sunnyside Plaza. Simon has won Emmy and Peabody awards, has received the Order of Lincoln from the State of Illinois, and was recently inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. His next book, Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known, was published in May 2026.

Jon Ghahate

Cultural educator and public historian from the Laguna and Zuni Pueblos of New Mexico

  • Jon Ghahate is of the Pueblos of Laguna and Zuni of the State of New Mexico and of the Turkey and Badger Clans. He works as an educator at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, in Cortez, Colorado, where he lectures on the histories and legacies of the Indigenous civilizations of the Western Hemisphere. His topics include Indigenous peoples’ origin narratives and their establishment of sophisticated political and agrarian civilizations several millennia before first contact with Europe and the colonization of their homelands. He is the former museum cultural educator at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, in Albuquerque, and has worked as a physician assistant, a high school math and science teacher, an athletic coach, and a producer at the public radio call-in show Native America Calling. He is a Vietnam-era veteran and served as a commissioned medical officer in the New Mexico Army National Guard.

Georgina Godwin

Broadcaster, interviewer, podcast host, and books editor at Monocle Radio

  • Georgina Godwin is a broadcast journalist and interviewer whose topics include literature, culture, and global affairs. She is books editor at Monocle Radio, where she hosts the flagship literary program Meet the Writers and the international current affairs show The Globalist. She also hosts Visionary, a podcast produced by the London-based ideas incubator Here East that explores the people shaping the future of technology, creativity, and work. Originally from Zimbabwe, she helped found the country’s first independent radio station and as a result was declared an “enemy of the state.” Now living in London, Godwin regularly moderates literary events worldwide and has interviewed hundreds of artists and authors, including Brian Eno, Sally Field, Ian McEwan, James Ellroy, and most Booker Prize winners since 2014. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and on the board of English PEN.

Maria Semple

New York Times bestselling author of the beloved laugh-out-loud novels Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different

  • Maria Semple is our poet laureate of discomfort, a writer whose genius springs from the bad choices and outrageous circumstances that motivate her characters. Her breakout bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette tells the story of a brilliant but daffily neurotic architect who sets her family and the upscale Seattle community abuzz when she mysteriously disappears. The New York Times described the book as “free-range hilarity,” and NPR praised the movie version, starring Cate Blanchett, as “delightful and eccentric.” Her novel Today Will Be Different follows a day in the life of a woman whose chaotic thoughts and actions make her young son seem like the grown-up in the room. “Somehow she makes her seethingly intolerant and dissatisfied heroines lovable for all their flaws,” noted The Guardian. Semple was a television writer for shows including Arrested Development and Mad About You before publishing her first novel, This One Is Mine. Her latest novel, Go Gentle, was released in April.

Kate Ferlic

New Mexico–based civil rights lawyer

  • Kate Ferlic is a New Mexico–based civil rights lawyer who has spent her career taking on some of the most difficult and consequential cases in the state, often against powerful institutions. She represents survivors of sexual violence and women fighting for equal pay, workplace dignity, and accountability. Her work sits at the intersection of law, power, and the stories we tell about both.


    A longtime, if occasionally interrupted, voracious reader (children will do that), Ferlic is especially drawn to stories where law and lived experience collide. She brings both a litigator’s precision and a reader’s curiosity to conversations about books like Without Consent, where the courtroom becomes part of a much larger story about autonomy, power, and what it takes to be believed.

    Ferlic is donating her honorarium for this event to NewMexicoWomen.Org, in memory of Sarah Ghiorse, whose commitment to these values—and to the power of women’s voices—makes this conversation especially meaningful.


Arthur Sze

U.S. poet laureate, National Book Award winner, and former poet laureate of Santa Fe

  • Arthur Sze perfectly articulated the value of poetry when he said, “We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.” In 2025 he was named poet laureate of the United States, released two new books—the poetry collection Into the Hush and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems—and received the Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry. His 2019 collection Sight Lines won the National Book Award for Poetry, and his 2014 collection Compass Rose was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe. Sze is also a renowned translator of Chinese poetry, and his book Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry was published in April.

Susan Orlean

New York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, and the memoir Joyride

  • Susan Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by The Washington Post and “a latter-day Tocqueville” by The New York Times. Her one-of-a-kind stories about people and places both familiar and totally obscure have earned her a reputation as one of America’s most delightful and surprising nonfiction writers. For more than thirty years, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has covered such wide-ranging subjects as urban chicken farming, the Tonya Harding Fan Club, and the World Taxidermy Championships. Her insatiable curiosity has resulted in some of today’s best-loved books, including The Orchid Thief (her breakout bestseller that inspired the film Adaptation, starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep), Rin Tin Tin (the best dog biography you’ll ever read), and The Library Book, an ode to a beloved and often undervalued institution. Orlean’s latest book is the memoir Joyride, named a best book of 2025 by NPR, Time, Kirkus Reviews, and Oprah Daily.

2026 Featured Presenters

Tommy Archuleta

Santa Fe poet laureate and author of the debut poetry collection Susto

  • Hometown treasure Tommy Archuleta works as a therapist at The Life Link, a nonprofit agency that has served the unhoused and migrant communities of Santa Fe for more than twenty years. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online literary journals, and his 2023 collection Susto was featured in Poets & Writers’ annual celebration of debut authors over the age of fifty. Archuleta is the current poet laureate of Santa Fe and a 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.

Matthew Contos

Educator, artist, and curator

  • Matthew Contos is a Santa Fe artist and curator whose work focuses on community programs, workshops, and events. He has held various roles in the city, including director of creativity and learning at the interdisciplinary arts institution SITE Santa Fe; director of public engagement and education at the Center for Contemporary Arts; and curator of public engagement at the photographic arts institute CENTER. He has also worked as a drug and alcohol abuse counselor and social services provider.

Patrick Dorsey

Publisher of the Santa Fe New Mexican

  • Patrick Dorsey has had a long career in newspaper publishing, beginning at Gannett in the 1990s. He is former publisher of the Austin American-Statesman, the Tallahassee Democrat, and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting during his tenure. He was named publisher of the Santa Fe New Mexican in 2023. Dorsey has also served as a controller for Tucson Newspapers Inc. and director of finance for Army Times Publishing Company and Florida Today. He is a member of the New Mexico Press Association board of directors and is the incoming board chair of America’s Newspapers.


Jamie Figueroa

Critically acclaimed memoirist, novelist, and teacher 

  • Jamie Figueroa is the author of the 2024 memoir Mother Island, about growing up as a Puerto Rican in white rural Ohio. Kirkus Reviews called it “searching and lyrical … filled with nuance and depth.” She is also the author of the critically acclaimed 2021 novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which was a Good Morning America Must-Read Book of the Month and named one of the most anticipated debuts of the year by Bustle, Electric Literature, The Millions, and The Rumpus. Figueroa has written for The New York Times, American Short Fiction, Elle, McSweeney’s, Emergence Magazine, Agni, and the Boston Review. She is a Bread Loaf and Truman Capote Scholar and teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe.

Dr. Shelly Lowe

President of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe

  • Dr. Shelly C. Lowe is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and grew up in Ganado, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. She served as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Biden administration and is currently president of the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe. During her long career in higher education, she has served as executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program, director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and graduate education program facilitator for the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies department. Lowe has also served as a board member for the National Indian Education Association, a trustee for the National Museum of the American Indian, and a member of the National Council on the Humanities, an appointment she received from President Barack Obama.

Zahra Marwan

Award-winning artist and author of the illustrated book Where Butterflies Fill the Sky

  • Zahra Marwan grew up in two deserts: one close to the sea in Kuwait, the other close to the mountains in New Mexico. She is a fine artist whose acclaimed 2022 book Where Butterflies Fill the Sky tells the story of her family’s immigration to the United States when she was a child. The book was named a New York Times/New York Public Library best illustrated children’s book and an NPR best book of the year and won the Ezra Jack Keats Honor for Illustration and the Dilys Evans Founder’s Award from the Society of Illustrators. In 2022, Marwan received an award from the United Nations Human Rights Council for creating art that brings visibility to statelessness, Indigenous groups, and minority rights. 

Carmella Padilla

Journalist, author, and
native New Mexican

  • CARMELLA PADILLA is a journalist, author, and editor who explores intersections in art, culture, and history in the Southwest and beyond. Her books include A Red Like No Other: How Cochineal Colored the World, The Work of Art: Folk Artists in the 21st Century, El Rancho de las Golondrinas: Living History in New Mexico’s La Ciénega Valley, Low ’n Slow: Lowriding in New Mexico, and The Chile Chronicles: Tales of a New Mexico Harvest. She is currently at work on a book about twentieth-century New Mexican furniture and a memoir. A nineteenth-generation native Santa Fean, Padilla is a co-founder of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival and a recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Swan Quill West

Founders and directors of the Santa Fe writers’ studio Swan Quill West

  • Nathaniel Berry and Liza Stewart’s creative and community work is grounded in the belief that writing is for everyone. Inspired by the diversity and vibrancy of New Mexico’s unique cultural heritage, they founded Swan Quill West in 2025 to serve emerging writers. With experience in education, social work, creative writing, and the transformative power of self-expression, they facilitate workshops that promote healing and support a more inclusive arts community. 


Emily Withnall

Writer and editor of El Palacio, the magazine of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs

  • Emily Withnall grew up in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and this deeply informs her writing about place, environment, history, and culture. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, High Country News, Orion, Tin House, River Teeth, The Kenyon Review, and other publications. She currently serves as editor of El Palacio, published by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, and is at work on a book that examines the parallels between domestic violence and extractive industries like fracking.


2025 Featured Authors
2024 Featured Authors
2023 Featured Authors
2022 Featured Authors

Infinity lies between the lines.