2024 Festival Authors and Moderators

We’re proud to announce that the following writers will be part of the 2024 Santa Fe International Literary Festival. Check back for the full lineup soon!

2024 Featured Authors

Jesmyn Ward

Two-time National Book Award winner and bestselling author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend

  • JESMYN WARD, novelist and nonfiction author, has been called “the new Toni Morrison” by the American Booksellers Association. The MacArthur “genius” grant recipient’s novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011 and 2017, respectively, making her the first woman and the first person of color to win the award twice. Sing was also nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and named one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time. Her 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ward’s first historical novel, Let Us Descend (2023), an instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, is informed by Ward’s personal experience of loss to violent or untimely deaths. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University.

David Grann

Bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, and
The Lost City of Z

  • DAVID GRANN is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of nonfiction titles including the National Book Award finalist Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI and The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. Grann has been called “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading,” with four New Yorker articles adapted for the screen, including Trial by Fire, The Old Man and the Gun, and The White Darkness. The screen adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio. His writing has appeared in The Best American Crime Writing, The New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He has earned honors including a George Polk Award, a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, and a Cullman Fellowship. He lives with his family in New York.

Lynsey Addario

Legendary conflict photographer and author of the bestselling memoir It’s What I Do

  • LYNSEY ADDARIO is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir It’s What I Do and a celebrated photojournalist covering conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She regularly photographs for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time and has been named by American Photo Magazine one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years. Addario was the official photographer for the Nobel Peace Center’s 10th Peace Prize Exhibition and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award for best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines and books. She was also part of the New York Times team to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In 2018 she published her first solo collection of photography, Of Love and War. She lives in London.

Julia Alvarez

Beloved bestselling author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies

  • JULIA ALVAREZ is the author of such acclaimed novels as How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, and Afterlife. Her other work includes collections of poems (Homecoming, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (Something to Declare, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti), and numerous books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, Finding Miracles, Return to Sender, and Where Do They Go?). Alvarez was born in New York City but spent the early years of her life in the Dominican Republic with her family. In 2013 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, and she has received the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award.

Kai Bird

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Robert Oppenheimer and others

  • Kai Bird won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with the late Martin J. Sherwin), which was adapted into Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer. His most recent book, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, was also a New York Times bestseller. Bird chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978 and has written biographies of Jimmy Carter, John J. McCloy, and the brothers McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. He’s won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and is the executive director and distinguished lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Revered investigative journalist for The New Yorker and author of Empire of Pain, Say Nothing, and Rogues

  • PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of five books of award-winning journalism. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, a New York Times bestseller, received the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize, among others. His reporting on the Sacklers inspired the 2023 hit Netflix series Painkiller, the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary The Crime of the Century, and the Oscar-nominated All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Keefe’s international bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal and was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the decade. Say Nothing has been adapted into an Apple+ series, scheduled to premiere in spring 2024. His latest book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, is a collection of his New Yorker articles.

Anne Lamott

Perennial New York Times bestselling author of Bird by Bird and Help, Thanks, Wow

  • ANNE LAMOTT writes and speaks about subjects that begin with capital letters: Alcoholism, Motherhood, Jesus. Her forthcoming book Somehow: Thoughts on Love, which will be published by Riverhead Books in April 2024, explores the transformative power that love has in our lives, how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. She is the author of seven novels and has written several bestselling books of nonfiction, including the classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. She has also authored several collections of autobiographical essays on faith, including Grace (Eventually). In addition, she has written the bestsellers Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers; Hallelujah Anyway; and Dusk, Night, Dawn. Lamott is the recipient of numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Hakim Bellamy

Former Albuquerque poet laureate and cultural activist

  • HAKIM BELLAMY has held the titles of inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque (2012–2014), National Poetry Slam champion, and creative writing chair at New Mexico School for the Arts. His poetry has been published on the Albuquerque Convention Center, on the outside of a library, in inner-city buses, and in numerous anthologies. Bellamy has received the Career Achievement Award from the University of New Mexico’s Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize for his work as a community organizer and journalist, and in 2017 he was named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. He has served as the on-air television host for New Mexico PBS’s ¡Colores! program for three years, was deputy director of the City of Albuquerque Department of Arts and Culture from 2018 to 2022, and is the founding president of Beyond Poetry LLC. He is currently pursuing a law degree at the University of New Mexico School of Law.

William deBuys

Author, conservationist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and New Mexico legend

  • WILLIAM DEBUYS is the author of ten books, the most recent of which, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, completes a trilogy that includes The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures and A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. His River of Traps (with photographer Alex Harris) was a Pulitzer nonfiction finalist in 1991. He co-wrote the feature documentary, The Colorado with director Murat Eyuboglu, and has been a Kluge Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress (2018), a Guggenheim Fellow (2008–2009), and a Lyndhurst Fellow (1986–1988). He lives and writes on the farm he has tended since 1976 in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Bryan Curtis

Journalist, podcast host, editor at large

  • BRYAN CURTIS is editor at large of the Los Angeles–based website and podcast network The Ringer. He writes about the media and hosts The Ringer’s twice-weekly podcast The Press Box, where he examines how news is made and conducts long-form interviews with journalists, novelists, and TV personalities. He has been a national correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a columnist at Slate, Texas Monthly, Grantland, and Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine. His stories have appeared in the annual Best American Sports Writing and Best American Travel Writing anthologies.

Anthony Doerr

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land

  • ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the novels About Grace, All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and Cloud Cuckoo Land, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award, as well as the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s work has won five O. Henry Prizes, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays, among other places, and has been translated into more than forty languages. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and the 2010 Story Prize. All the Light We Cannot See, which was recently adapted into the Netflix series of the same name, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and remained on the Times bestseller list for more than two hundred weeks. Doerr lives in Idaho.

Ramona Emerson

Celebrated debut novelist and filmmaker

  • RAMONA EMERSON is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. Her debut novel, 2023’s Shutter, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and won the Lefty Award for Best First Novel. Shutter was also a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel. Emerson has a BA in media arts from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Albuquerque, where she and her husband, the producer Kelly Byars, run the production company Reel Indian Pictures.

Jamie Figueroa

Critically acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and educator

  • JAMIE FIGUEROA is the author of the just-published memoir Mother Island and the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which was short-listed for the Reading the West Book Award and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was an Indie Next pick and a Good Morning America Must-Read Book of the Month, and was named a most anticipated debut of the year by Bustle, Electric Literature, The Millions, and Rumpus. A member of the faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Figueroa has published writing in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times, and the Boston Review. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation alum, she received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Scholar. Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.

Diana Gabaldon

Internationally bestselling author of the Outlander series

  • DIANA GABALDON is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the wildly popular Outlander novels—Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, An Echo in the Bone, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone—as well as the related Lord John Grey books, Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, Lord John and the Hand of Devils, and The Scottish Prisoner; a collection of novellas, Seven Stones to Stand or Fall; three works of nonfiction, “I Give You My Body . . .” and The Outlandish Companion, Volumes 1 and 2; and the Outlander graphic novel The Exile. She has also contributed to the new collaborative novel Fourteen Days. She and her husband split their time between Scottsdale, Arizona, and Santa Fe.

Natalie Goldberg

Legendary writing teacher and author of Writing Down the Bones

  • NATALIE GOLDBERG is the author of fifteen books, including the classic Writing Down the Bones, which has sold more than two million copies and been translated into twenty languages. Among her other books are the memoirs Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America and Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home, the novel Banana Rose, her legacy book The True Secret of Writing, and, most recently, Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. She has taught writing as a Zen practice for the past forty-five years nationally and internationally. She lives in northern New Mexico.

Buddhist teacher, social and environmental activist, and author

Roshi Joan Halifax

  • 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.

Hua Hsu

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner for the memoir Stay True

  • HUA HSU is the author of the memoir Stay True, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, as well as the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The Wall Street Journal hailed it as “a luminous and tender-hearted story … a nuanced and beautiful evocation of young adulthood in all its sloppy, exuberant glory. Stay True was one of Time’s Must-Read Books of the Year, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year, a Publishers Weekly best nonfiction book of the year, and a New Yorker best book of the year. Hsu has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017 and a contributor since 2014. He is also the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. He teaches at Bard College and has also taught at Harvard and Vassar College.

Cheryl Alters Jamison

Four-time James Beard Award winner and author of some twenty cookbooks

  • CHERYL ALTERS JAMISON is the author of Tasting New Mexico: Recipes Celebrating 100 Years of Distinctive Home Cooking and the recipient of four James Beard Foundation Book Awards and an International Association of Culinary Professionals award. On her own and with her late husband, Bill Jamison, she has written some twenty books, including The Border Cookbook, Texas Q, Texas Slow Cooker, and American Home Cooking. She has appeared on the Today show and on the Food Network with Bobby Flay. Jamison is host of the Heating It Up radio show and is the narrator of the upcoming TV docuseries Santa Fe Foods. She also created the famous New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger Trail and teaches at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. She’s a four-decade resident of the village of Tesuque, north of Santa Fe.

Demetria Martínez

Author of the now classic Mother Tongue

  • DEMETRIA MARTÍNEZ is a writer and poet based in La Ciénega, New Mexico. Her books include the widely translated novel Mother Tongue and the American Book Award–winning The Block Captain’s Daughter, as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poetry. Mother Tongue is partly based on Martínez’s work as a reporter covering the faith-based Sanctuary movement. In 1986 she accompanied a Lutheran minister to the U.S.–Mexico border, where he met two Salvadoran women fleeing U.S.-funded death squads and brought them to safety in Albuquerque. Martínez and the minister were charged with conspiracy against the U.S. government for aiding their entry. She faced 25 years in prison and $1.25 million in fines but was acquitted on First Amendment grounds after a 1988 trial. Her current works include translations of Spanish ballads by her grandfather Luis Martínez and Two Women Two Worlds, a poetic collaboration with writer Susan Sherman.

Ellen McGirt

Award-winning journalist and community builder

  • ELLEN McGIRT is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor in chief of Design Observer, an independent media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. McGirt established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published more than twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good.

James McGrath Morris

Prizewinning biographer and author of New York Times bestselling narrative nonfiction

  • JAMES McGRATH MORRIS is the author of Tony Hillerman: A Life, the first major biography of the groundbreaking mystery writer. Morris’s books also include the New York Times bestselling Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Hooks National Book Award; The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War; Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, which The Wall Street Journal deemed one of the five best books on American moguls and Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies; and The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism—a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He is one of the founders and past presidents of the Biographers International Organization and makes his home in Santa Fe.

Manuel Muñoz

MacArthur Fellow, short story master, educator

  • MANUEL MUÑOZ is the author of three collections of short stories: The Consequences, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and Zigzagger. His novel What You See in the Dark was published in 2011. Muñoz is a recipient of a 2023 MacArthur “genius” grant and the winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His stories have three times been awarded the O. Henry Prize and have twice appeared in the annual Best American Short Stories. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Zyzzyva, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, Muñoz is a professor at the University of Arizona, in Tucson

Tommy Orange

Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for There There

  • TOMMY ORANGE is the author of the 2018 New York Times bestselling novel There There, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Margaret Atwood praised it as “an astonishing literary debut,” and The New York Times described it as “a tense, prismatic book with inexorable momentum.” Orange’s follow-up, Wandering Stars, published in February, has been hailed by Time as one of the most anticipated books of 2024. Publishers Weekly has said, “With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters’ memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange’s essential place in the canon of Native American literature.” Born and raised in Oakland, California, where he lives today, Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

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 native New Mexican, 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.

Garrett Peck

Historian, author, and Willa Cather authority

  • GARRETT PECK is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, specializing in adventure travel and historic and cultural interpretation. The author of eight books about American history, Garrett’s latest is A Decade of Disruption: America in the New Millennium. He is currently working on a book about Willa Cather’s great classic Death Comes for the Archbishop, which will be published in 2025 by University of New Mexico Press. Peck will be leading the Festival’s Walk & Talk tour on Cather.

Douglas Preston

Bestselling journalist and co-author of the Pendergast thrillers

  • DOUGLAS PRESTON has published thirty-eight books, both fiction and nonfiction, thirty-two of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In addition to books, he writes occasional pieces for The New Yorker. He is the creator, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of novels. Preston’s 2017 nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and a Times Notable Book of the Year, and his nonfiction book The Monster of Florence is currently in production as a television series. Preston previously worked as an editor for the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He is president emeritus of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists and is the co-editor, with Margaret Atwood, of the new collaborative novel Fourteen Days.

Roxana Robinson

Celebrated novelist, short story writer, and Georgia O’Keeffe biographer

  • ROXANA ROBINSON is the bestselling author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and in the new collaborative novel Fourteen Days. Robinson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and she was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library. Robinson has served on the boards of PEN and the Authors Guild and was the president of the Authors Guild. She has received the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers Award,” given by Poets and Writers, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community from the Authors Guild. She teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Marin Sardy

Acclaimed memoirist and essayist

  • MARIN SARDY is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Edge of Every Day (Pantheon, 2019). Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Guernica, The Paris Review, and other journals, as well as in two award-winning New Mexico–based photography books, Landscape Dreams and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby. Sardy’s work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three times listed as “notable” in the Best American series. She teaches memoir and personal essay writing for Authors Publish and Pace University.

Jenn Shapland

Prizewinning essayist and memoirist

  • JENN SHAPLAND is the author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of a 2021 Lambda Literary Award. Her most recent book, Thin Skin: Essays, was a Time, Publishers Weekly, and New York Public Library best book of 2023. Alexander Chee, the author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, calls it “a wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear power, healthcare, queerness and American life unlike any I can think of, in essays that give lessons in pushing this form to the limit. The resulting collection is iconoclastic, electric, illuminating … a book to keep for a long time.” Terry Tempest Williams has called it “an important and visionary book.” Shapland lives in Santa Fe, where she works as an archivist for a visual artist.

Hampton Sides

Bestselling master of narrative histories including  Blood and Thunder and In the Kingdom of Ice

  • HAMPTON SIDES is the author of the bestselling narrative histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post. His latest book is The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, to be published by Doubleday in April 2024. His journalism has been frequently anthologized, and he is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the PEN USA Award for Nonfiction. A past fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, Hampton is a board member of the Authors Guild and the Society of American Historians.

Tracy K. Smith

Former U.S. poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of To Free the Captives

  • Two-term U.S. poet laureate TRACY K. SMITH is a memoirist, translator, and opera librettist for the world premiere of The Righteous. She is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, including Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, as well as The Body’s Question, Duende, and Wade in the Water. Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her newest book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023), grapples with being Black, being an American, and what it means to be free. The opera The Righteous, a collaboration by Smith and composer Gregory Spears, will make its world premiere on July 13, 2024, at the Santa Fe Opera. Smith is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Arthur Sze

National Book Award–winning poet

  • ARTHUR SZE is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems; Sight Lines, which won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light, selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu; The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian-American Literary Award; and Archipelago, selected for an American Book Award. The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in May 2024. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Luci Tapahonso

Revered educator and inaugural poet laureate of the Diné Nation

  • LUCI TAPAHONSO is professor emerita of English Literature at the University of New Mexico and served as the inaugural poet laureate of the Diné Nation from 2013 to 2015. She is the author of six award-winning books of poetry and prose, including A Radiant Curve and Blue Horses Rush In, as well as three children’s books. She has also taught poetry writing and contemporary American and Navajo literature at the University of Kansas, the University of Arizona, Diné College, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her many honors include the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, Italy’s Ostana Prize, which honors authors who write in their mother tongue, and the Luci Tapahonso Distinguished Indigenous Speaker Series, established by the University of New Mexico. She has read everywhere from Harvard and Princeton to the University of New Zealand and the Tbilisi International Festival of Literature, in the Republic of Georgia.

John Vaillant

2023 National Book Award finalist in nonfiction for Fire Weather

  • JOHN VAILLANT is the author of the 2023 bestseller Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times. Fire Weather was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Vaillant’s other bestselling books include The Golden Spruce: A Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, which won several awards, including Canada’s Writers’ Trust and Governor General’s awards for nonfiction; The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, which has been published in sixteen languages; and the 2015 novel The Jaguar's Children, which was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Kirkus Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Vaillant contributes to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian and received the 2014 international Windham Campbell Prize in nonfiction for his “gripping narratives that combine science, geography, history and anthropology to convey his passionate commitment to preserving natural resources in an environmentally threatened world.” He lives with his family in Vancouver

Wang Jiaxin

Award-winning poet, translator, and educator

  • WANG JIAXIN is an eminent Chinese poet, essayist, and translator who has published more than forty books. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror, translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, who said the collection “belongs to this moment, and reading it, one is aware again that poetry is not a matter of movements and historical moments, but of individual voices, in this case stunningly alert and interior.” Wang’s poems have been published in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review, and he has been a poet in residence at the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He has won many domestic and international awards, including the inaugural Ai Qing Poetry Award. An esteemed translator of Yeats, Mandelstam, and especially Paul Celan, he has also translated books by American poets Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky. Wang was a professor at Renmin University of China for years and now splits his time between Beijing and New York.

Javier Zamora

Author of the extraordinary memoir Solito, a New York Times Notable Book

  • JAVIER ZAMORA is the author of the searing 2022 memoir Solito, which was a New York Times bestseller and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. He has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Zamora has also been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Macondo, and Yaddo. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of war and immigration on his family. Javier was born in El Salvador and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

The Santa Fe International Literary Festival grew out of the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival, which launched in May 2022. We were so proud to feature the following authors during our first two years, and look forward to an equally robust lineup at the 2024 festival, May 17—19.

2023 Featured Authors

Hakim Bellamy

  • HAKIM BELLAMY served as the inaugural poet laureate for the City of Albuquerque from 2012 to 2014 before becoming the deputy director of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture. He has been a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellow, an Academy for the Love of Learning Leonard Bernstein fellow, a Western States Arts Alliance Launchpad fellow, a Santa Fe Arts Institute Food Justice fellow, a New Mexico Strategic Leadership Institute alum, and a Citizen University Civic Seminary fellow. In 2012 he published his first collection of poetry, Swear, for which won the Working-Class Studies Association Tillie Olsen Award for Literature. His seventh and latest title, Commissions y Corridos, was published in 2022. Bellamy has held adjunct faculty positions at the University of New Mexico and the Institute of American Indian Arts, has shared his work in person in at least six countries, and continues to use his art to change his communities.

Former Albuquerque Poet Laureate and cultural activist

Jennifer Egan

  • JENNIFER EGAN is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the L.A. Times Book Prize and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time, Entertainment Weekly, and others. Her next novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s 2017 “One Book, One New York” read. Her latest novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2022 by The New York Times. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, which was adapted into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001; Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories, and The Keep. Egan’s journalistic work has appeared frequently in The New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as president of PEN America.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
A Visit From the Goon Squad

Priyanka Kumar

  • PRIYANKA KUMAR is the author of Conversations with Birds, widely acclaimed as “a landmark book” that “could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls” (Psychology Today). Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and The Rumpus. Her work has been featured on CBS News Radio, Yale Climate Connections, and Oprah Daily. She is a recipient of a Playa residency, an Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award, a New Mexico New Visions governor’s award, a Canada Council for the Arts grant, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences fellowship. Kumar holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar.

Award-winning essayist & author of Conversations with Birds

Beth Macy

  • BETH MACY is the award-winning author of four New York Times bestselling books: Factory Man; Truevine; Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America; and Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. Her first book, Factory Man, won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize, and Dopesick was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick has been made into a Peabody Award–winning and Emmy-winning series on which she acted as an executive producer and cowriter. Raising Lazarus is the powerful next installment in the defining American disaster story of our era.

Celebrated journalist and author 
of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus

Manuel Muñoz

Master of the short story & three-time O. Henry Award winner


  • MANUEL MUÑOZ’s new collection of short stories, The Consequences, was published in 2022 to rave reviews. As Sandra Cisneros puts it, “Muñoz is a great American writer who sees with his heart … I wish I had written these stories.” He is the author of two previous collections of stories, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and a novel, What You See in the Dark. Muñoz has been recognized with a Whiting Award, three O. Henry Awards, and an appearance in The Best American Short Stories. His frequently anthologized work has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, ZYZZYVA, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, Muñoz lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

David Quammen

  • DAVID QUAMMEN has been hailed by The New York Times as “not just among our best science writers but among our best writers, period.” His sixteen books include Breathless, which was a 2022 finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Premio Letterario Merck. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, two Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python.

New York Times bestselling author of Spillover

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  • INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was published to great critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, and The Paris Review, among others. She is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco.

National Book Award finalist for The Man Who Could Move Clouds

David Treuer

  • DAVID TREUER is the author of Rez Life and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, a sweeping history and counternarrative of Native American life from the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre to the present. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee was named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, Time, and Barack Obama and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. A member of the Ojibwe nation from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, Treuer trained as an anthropologist and is a professor of literature at the University of Southern California. He has spent his career researching Native lives, both past and present. In his nonfiction books as well as his writing for The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine, he explores the intense struggles to preserve Native identity and tells an essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Rez Life

Gillian Flynn

  • GILLIAN FLYNN is the author of the runaway hit Gone Girl, an international sensation that spent more than seventy-five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Flynn’s previous novels, Dark Places and Dagger Award winner Sharp Objects, were also Times bestsellers, and her work has been published in forty languages. The 2014 film adaptation of Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, was nominated for several awards including an Oscar and a BAFTA, and the HBO adaptation of Sharp Objects, starring Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson, was released in 2018 to immense acclaim, launching Flynn’s work back onto the New York Times bestseller list. She also co-wrote, with Academy Award–winning director Steve McQueen, the 2018 thriller film Widows, which starred Viola Davis and Liam Neeson. Flynn lives in Chicago with her husband and son.

Bestselling author of the runaway hits Gone Girl & Sharp Objects

Ed Yong

  • ED YONG is a British American science journalist whose bestselling books include I Contain Multitudes, a groundbreaking and highly entertaining examination of the relationship between animals and microbes, and An Immense World, which takes a comprehensive look at the fascinating sensory worlds of animals and was named one of the ten best books of 2022 by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. For his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic he received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, the George Polk Award for science reporting, and the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism, among other prizes. Yong is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has a Chatham Island black robin named after him. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Pulitzer Prize–winning
science writer

Hampton Sides

  • HAMPTON SIDES is the author of the bestselling narrative histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, and In the Kingdom of Ice. His most recent book, On Desperate Ground, was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and is under development for the screen; Hellhound on His Trail, about the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hunt for his killer, was the basis of the acclaimed PBS documentary “Roads to Memphis.” His journalistic works have been frequently anthologized and he is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist. He is now at work on a book about the fateful last voyage of Captain James Cook.

Bestselling master of
narrative history

Carmella Padilla

  • 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 native New Mexican, 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.

Journalist, author, and
native New Mexican

Douglas Preston

  • DOUGLAS PRESTON has published thirty-eight books, both fiction and nonfiction, thirty-two of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In addition to books, he writes occasional pieces for The New Yorker. He is the creator, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of novels. Preston’s most recent nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and was named by the Times as a Notable Book of the Year, and his nonfiction book The Monster of Florence is currently in production as a television series. Preston previously worked as an editor for the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He is president emeritus of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.

Bestselling journalist & co-author 
of the Preston & Child thrillers

Namwali Serpell

  • NAMWALI SERPELL’s new novel, The Furrows, has been named one of the top ten books of 2022 by The New York Times and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. The New Yorker has written that it “reinvents the elegy.” Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction “that confronts racism and explores diversity,” the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires for Belles-Lettres. It was also named one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019 and a book of the year by the New York Times critics, The Atlantic, NPR, and BuzzFeed. Born in Lusaka, Zambia, she now lives in New York and teaches at Harvard University.

Award-winning author of The Old Drift  and The Furrows

John Irving

  • JOHN IRVING has written fifteen novels over the course of his prolific career, including The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year, and his most recent, The Last Chairlift. Five of his books have been adapted for film. As Time has described his work: “It is impossible to imagine the American—or international—literary landscape without John Irving … He is as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens in the scope of his celebrity and the level of his achievement.” Irving’s longtime commitment to social justice, feminism, and tolerance for sexual minorities has made him a bard of alternative families and a strong voice on the subject of sexual freedom. Among his many honors are the O. Henry Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club. He’s also been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He lives in Toronto.

Legendary author of The
World According to Garp

Kathleen McCleery

  • KATHLEEN McCLEERY is an award-winning broadcast journalist who has worked for PBS and NBC News during her four-decade career. As a special correspondent and freelance producer for PBS NewsHour since 2014, she reports occasional stories on a wide range of topics including politics, the environment, education, science, healthcare, and the arts. Before moving to New Mexico, she was NewsHour’s deputy executive producer in charge of the daily show. McCleery taught journalism at her alma mater, Princeton University, in 2016 and 2018, focusing on media coverage of U.S. elections. She’s been a book lover since she learned to read (which her mother claimed was as a toddler). Her book club in Corrales tackles fiction and nonfiction, short and long, new and classic.

Award-winning PBS correspondent and producer

Patricia Trujillo

  • PATRICIA TRUJILLO is a Chicana feminist scholar from Española, New Mexico. She teaches and writes about women’s issues, representations of acequia- and land-based cultures, and food/farm justice in New Mexico literature. Trujillo is currently the deputy cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Higher Education Department. For more than a decade she was a faculty member in the Department of Languages and Letters at Northern New Mexico College and the founding director of the college’s Office of Equity and Diversity. Though she is on a hiatus from teaching, Trujillo believes in the power of story to shape and heal communities. She has a PhD in U.S. Latina/Latino literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio, was the creative writing editor for the journal Chicana/Latina Studies from 2016 to 2021, and has numerous publications in anthologies and journals. Her article “An Acequia Runs Through It” will be included in the forthcoming anthology 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution. She sits on the boards of Tewa Women United, the LANL Foundation, Rural Opportunities for College Access, and NewMexicoWomen.org.

Writer, editor, educator,
and feminist scholar

Colum McCann

  • COLUM McCANN is widely considered one of the most ambitious, transformative writers working today. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he is the author of seven novels, including Let the Great World Spin, TransAtlantic, Zoli, and Dancer, as well as three story collections and two works of nonfiction. His work has been published in forty languages, and he has been the recipient of many international honors, including the National Book Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, as well as several other European awards and an Oscar nomination. His most recent novel, Apeirogon, was a global bestseller. His first major nonfiction book, American Mother, will be published in January 2024. McCann is the president and co-founder of the nonprofit global story exchange organization Narrative 4 and the Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, in New York, where he lives with his family.

National Book Award winner
for Let the Great World Spin

Denise Chávez

  • DENISE CHÁVEZ is a fronteriza writer, activist, and owner, with her husband, photographer Daniel Zolinsky, of Casa Camino Real Bookstore, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is the author of The King and Queen of Comezón, Loving Pedro Infante, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, and Face of an Angel. Her awards include the New Mexico Governor’s Award, the American Book Award, the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. Chávez is also director and co-founder, with Kari Lenander of the Border Servant Corps, of Libros para el Viaje/Books for the Journey, which delivers books to refugee, migrant, and asylum-seeking children and families on the U.S.–Mexico border. Currently, Chávez is co-editing, with Enrique Lamadrid, We Are Here to Represent, an anthology of works by multigenerational, multilingual writers and artists. She is also creating the Museo de La Gente/Museum of the People, a living archive, library, bookstore, and community resource center in Las Cruces.

Fronteriza writer, activist,
and  New Mexico treasure

Laura Furman

  • LAURA FURMAN is the author of four short story collections, two novels, and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Southwest Review, The American Scholar, Subtropics, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories from 2003 to 2019, she has been awarded residencies by the Liguria Study Center (Bogliasco), the American Academy in Rome, and Yaddo. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Paisano Project, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Furman is professor emerita at the University of Texas at Austin and lives in Albuquerque.

Professor emerita, novelist, memoirist, and short story writer

Natachee Momaday Gray

  • NATACHEE MOMADAY GRAY is a Santa Fe native and narradora indígena. She comes from a long line of storytellers, and honors that tradition by focusing on the melding of art and myth, ancestry and nostalgia, food and prayer, glamour, frivolity, and the passage of time. Moving between English, Spanish, and the blood memory of the Plains people, she addresses her boundless identity, sometimes using the alias Tatja Lucía. In February she published her first collection of poetry, Silver Box. She often performs accompanied by her husband, musician Kyle Perkins.

Poet, Santa Fe native, and narradora indígena

Don J. Usner

  • DON J. USNER, a thirteenth-generation New Mexican, was born in Embudo and grew up in Los Alamos and Chimayó. He earned an M.A. in cultural geography at the University of New Mexico and has authored several books of nonfiction, including Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza; Chasing Dichos Through Chimayó; Benigna’s Chimayó: Cuentos from the Old Plaza; and (with William deBuys) Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve. His photographs appear in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Land and People, El Palacio, and New Mexico Magazine. Usner’s writing and photography reflect his long and intimate association with the land and people of northern New Mexico.

New Mexico author-photographer,
narrating generations of place

Lucy Lippard

  • LUCY R. LIPPARD is a writer, activist, curator, and author of twenty-six books on contemporary art activism, feminism, place, photography, archaeology, and land use, including Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West; Time and Time Again (with photographer Peter Goin), on Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde; Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782; Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo Since 1814; Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America; and The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. She is co-founder of several activist and feminist organizations and recipient of nine honorary degrees, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from Creative Capital and the Lannan Foundation. She lives off the grid in rural New Mexico, where for a quarter century she has edited the monthly community newsletter El Puente de Galisteo.

Acclaimed art and land activist,
author of Galisteo Basin histories

Natalie Goldberg

  • NATALIE GOLDBERG is the author of fifteen books, including the classic Writing Down the Bones, which has sold more than two million copies and been translated into twenty languages. Among her other books are the memoirs Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America and Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home, the novel Banana Rose, her legacy book The True Secret of Writing, and, most recently, Three Simple Lines, a Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. She has taught writing as a Zen practice for the past forty-five years nationally and internationally. She lives in northern New Mexico.

Legendary writing teacher and author of Writing Down the Bones

Stanley Crawford

  • STANLEY CRAWFORD has lived since 1969 in the Embudo Valley of northern New Mexico, where he divides his time between writing and farming. He has published four nonfiction books about northern New Mexico, including Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament. His most recent nonfiction work is The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires. He has also published several novels, including the modern classic Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Village, and Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood. Crawford has been the recipient of two National Endowment fellowships, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Centrum, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center. He has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and UMass Amherst and is a regular visiting professor at the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies at Colorado College.

Beloved author of the farm classics
Mayordomo & A Garlic Testament

Deborah Taffa

  • DEBORAH TAFFA is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe. Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary History, she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, the Ellen Meloy Fund, A Public Space, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her memoir Whiskey Tender is forthcoming from HarperCollins next year. Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo.

Forthcoming memoirist and director of creative writing at IAIA

N. Scott Momaday

Pulitzer Prize winner and
SFILF Honorary Chair

  • N. SCOTT MOMADAY is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller whose works celebrate and preserve Native American heritage. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, and is the author of many other novels, poetry and essay collections, and children’s books, including The Way to Rainy Mountain, Angle of Geese, Earth Keeper, and his latest, Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including an Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and the 2021 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. A longtime professor of English and American literature, Momaday earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and retired as Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. He lives in New Mexico.

Marin Sardy

  • MARIN SARDY is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia (2019). Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker online, Tin House, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, and many other journals, as well as in two award-winning New Mexico–based photography books, Landscape Dreams (2012) and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby (2009). A Pushcart Prize nominee, Sardy has three times had her work listed as “notable” in the Best American series and has been awarded residency fellowships at Hawthornden Castle, Catwalk Institute, and the Museum of Motherhood. Based in Santa Fe, she holds an MFA from Columbia University and teaches memoir and personal essay writing for Authors Publish.

Critically acclaimed memoirist and essayist

Estevan Rael-Gálvez

  • ESTEVAN RAEL-GÁLVEZ, anthropologist, historian, and cultural consultant, has served as senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, as executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and as the state historian of New Mexico. He is currently the executive director of Native Bound Unbound: Archive of the Indigenous Enslaved, a digital initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation. He received his BA in English literature and ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MA and PhD in American cultures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he completed his dissertation, “Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity,” the basis of a book project. Rael-Gálvez grew up on both his family’s sheep ranch and farm in Costilla, New Mexico, and Jaroso, Colorado, as well as with his grandmother in Questa, New Mexico.

Cultural anthropologist, historian, and creative strategist

Alexander Parsons

  • ALEXANDER PARSONS is a novelist and teacher who serves as the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he teaches a vibrant mix of MFA and PhD candidates. He has published two novels, In the Shadows of the Sun and Leaving Disneyland, and has received various writing and teaching awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, and a Texas Fellowship in Literature, as well as the Ross M. Lence Awards in the Humanities and Teaching Excellence from the University of Houston. He earned advanced degrees at both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and New Mexico State University.

Bestselling novelist and
professor of creative writing

Jill Momaday

Kiowa actress, writer,
and filmmaker

  • JILL MOMADAY is an actor, writer, and filmmaker whose feature Return to Rainy Mountain (PBS) documents her Kiowa heritage and her life in the arts as the daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning author N. Scott Momaday. Jill is assistant director of the N. Scott Momaday Literary Trust and keeper of the Momaday family archives. Raised in Santa Fe, she is working on a collection of short stories and a memoir.

Michael McGarrity

  • MICHAEL McGARRITY is the author of the bestselling Kevin Kerney series of fourteen vividly evoked crime novels set in New Mexico. With Residue and Head Wounds, he concluded the series, but not before the publication of his groundbreaking American West historical trilogy—Hard Country, Backlands, and The Last Ranch—about the Kerney family in New Mexico from 1875 to the end of the Vietnam War. His newest outing, The Long Ago, to be published in July, is a spinoff to the series, set in the mid-twentieth century. It’s the story of the Montana family of Sara Brannon, the woman Kerney fell in love with in McGarrity’s debut novel, Tularosa.

Author of the bestselling 
Kevin Kerney crime novels 

Laila Lalami

  • LAILA LALAMI was born and raised in Morocco, a place whose past and present permeate her writing. A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, she is a unique and confident voice in the conversations about race and immigration that increasingly occupy our national attention. Her first book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is a fictional collection of intimate character portraits of a group of immigrants trying to escape Morocco for a better life in Europe. Her novel The Moor’s Account won the American Book Award, and the Arab American Book Award, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award. Lalami’s first book of nonfiction, Conditional Citizens, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the best books of 2020 by Time, NPR, and The Los Angeles Times and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Author of The Moor’s Account, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Diana Gabaldon

  • DIANA GABALDON is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the wildly popular Outlander novels—Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voy­ager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, An Echo in the Bone, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone—as well as the related Lord John Grey books, Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, Lord John and the Hand of Devils, and The Scottish Prisoner; a collection of novellas, Seven Stones to Stand or Fall; three works of nonfiction, “I Give You My Body . . .” and The Outlandish Com­panion, Volumes 1 and 2; and the Outlander graphic novel The Exile. She and her husband split their time between Scottsdale, Arizona, and Santa Fe.

Internationally bestselling
author of the Outlander series

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

  • NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black and the highly anticipated Chain-Gang All-Stars, which will be published in April. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and Friday Black was the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book. Raised in Spring Valley, New York, he now lives in the Bronx.

Author of Friday Black and the  forthcoming Chain-Gang All-Stars

Sandra Blakeslee

  • SANDRA BLAKESLEE spent nearly five decades at The New York Times writing about science and medicine, with a particular focus on the brain. She is the co-author of many books, including Phantoms in the Brain, Sleights of Mind, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, and On Intelligence. Blakeslee is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Templeton fellow in the study of science and religion, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and was the first journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She is co-founder of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, which just closed its doors after twenty-five years of nurturing young science writers.

New York Times
science writer and author

Luis Alberto Urrea

  • LUIS ALBERTO URREA is the award-winning author of sixteen books that span a range of genres, from The Devil’s Highway, a nonfiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, to his acclaimed novels Into the Beautiful North and The House of Broken Angels to the historical novels The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America, which together tell the epic story of Teresita Urrea, a great-aunt who was a healer and Mexican folk hero. His new novel, Good Night, Irene, will be published May 30. Called “a kind of literary badass … a master storyteller with a rock and roll heart” by NPR, Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother. He lives with his family outside Chicago and teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Acclaimed author of 17 books including The Devil’s Highway 

Kate Nelson

Veteran New Mexico
journalist and poet


  • Kate Nelson holds a spot in the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame for excellence in political reporting, feature writing, and commentary at The Albuquerque Tribune. She has also explored public issues as the former host of KNME-TV’s New Mexico In Focus and as a national commentator for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. During her tenure as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine, she dived into matters of culture, history, and identity, and in 2021 the International Regional Magazine Association named her Writer of the Year. Nelson is the author of the 2012 artist biography Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved and has work included in the forthcoming New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023.

Michelle Otero

Community-based artist & former Albuquerque Poet Laureate


  • MICHELLE OTERO is the author of Vessels: A Memoir of Borders, the poetry collection Bosque, and the essay collection Malinche’s Daughter. She served as Albuquerque’s poet laureate from 2018 to 2020 and co-edited the forthcoming New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023 and 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso, a tribute to victims of the 2019 El Paso shooting and winner of a New Mexico–Arizona Book Award. A coach, community-based artist, and racial healing practitioner, she is the founder of ArteSana Creative Consulting, dedicated to creative expression and storytelling as the basis for organizational development and positive social change. Originally from Deming, New Mexico, Otero holds a BA in history from Harvard College and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

Cheryl Alters Jamison

  • CHERYL ALTERS JAMISON is the author of Tasting New Mexico: Recipes Celebrating 100 Years of Distinctive Home Cooking, and the recipient of four James Beard Foundation Book Awards and an International Association of Culinary Professionals award. On her own and with her late husband, Bill Jamison, she has written some 20 books, including The Border Cookbook, Texas Q, Texas Slow Cooker, and American Home Cooking. She has appeared on the Today show and on the Food Network with Bobby Flay. Cheryl is host of the Heating It Up radio show and is the narrator of the upcoming TV docuseries Foods of Santa Fe. She also created the famous New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger Trail, and teaches at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. She’s a four-decade resident of the village of Tesuque, north of Santa Fe.

James Beard Award Winner and author of over 19 cookbooks

Roshi Joan Halifax

  • 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.

Buddhist teacher, social and environmental activist, and author

Sally Denton

  • SALLY DENTON is a bestselling author, investigative reporter, and historian who writes about subjects that are often ignored—from an international drug ring in Kentucky to organized crime in Las Vegas, from corruption within the Mormon Church to the hidden history of manifest destiny, from one of America’s most bitter political campaigns, run by Richard Nixon, to a coup attempt against Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of nine nonfiction books, including the true crime bestseller The Bluegrass Conspiracy and, most recently The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land. A third-generation Nevadan, born in Elko, Denton is a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. She has lived in Santa Fe for thirty-four years.

Bestselling investigative journalist  and author of The Colony

Yvon Chouinard

  • YVON CHOUINARD is a passionate activist and an iconoclastic businessman. He was a teenager and self-taught blacksmith when he founded Chouinard Equipment. The company grew to dominate the alpine climbing market and inspired a new era of “clean climbing.” In 1973, he founded Patagonia, a company known for its quality products and commitment to advancing solutions to the environmental crisis. In September 2022, Chouinard and his family transferred their ownership of the company to a trust and a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting our home planet. His business memoir Let My People Go Surfing has been published in 16 languages and has sold more than 500,000 copies, and his book The Responsible Company tells how to operate a values-led business. Chouinard executive-produced the documentaries Artifishal, DamNation, and Public Trust and has co-founded organizations that include 1% for the Planet, the Fair Labor Association, the Conservation Alliance, and the Regenerative Organic Alliance.

Legendary Patagonia founder, adventurer, activist, and author

Jon Krakauer

  • JON KRAKAUER is the author of eight books, including Into the Wild, Into Thin Air (a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize), Under the Banner of Heaven, Where Men Win Glory, and Missoula. After graduating from Hampshire College in 1976, he worked as a carpenter and commercial salmon fisherman before embarking on a writing career. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, whose citation said, “Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer.” In the aftermath of the 1996 Everest tragedy that was the subject of Into Thin Air, he became involved with the American Himalayan Foundation in order to repay his gratitude to the Sherpas who assisted him and others in that calamity. Krakauer serves as the board chair of this extraordinary organization.

Bestselling narrative nonfiction author and investigative journalist

2022 Featured Authors

Margaret Atwood ᐧ Freddie Bitsoie ᐧ Louise Boyle ᐧ Sherri Burr ᐧ Sandra Cisneros ᐧ Lynn Cline ᐧ Bryan Curtis ᐧ William deBuys ᐧ Ashley C. Ford ᐧ John Grisham ᐧ Roshi Joan Halifax ᐧ Joy Harjo ᐧ Anne Hillerman ᐧ Cheryl Alters Jamison ᐧ Craig Johnson ᐧ Asma Khan ᐧ Phil Klay ᐧ Jon Krakauer ᐧ Cecile Lipworth ᐧ Amy Grace Loyd ᐧ Valeria Luiselli ᐧ Deborah Madison ᐧ Emily St. John Mandel ᐧ George R.R. Martin ᐧ Kathleen McCleery ᐧ N. Scott Momaday ᐧ James McGrath Morris ᐧ Sarit Packer ᐧ Carmella Padilla ᐧ Douglas Preston ᐧ Kirstin Valdez Quade ᐧ Rebecca Roanhorse ᐧ Bob Shacochis ᐧ Henry Shukman ᐧ Hampton Sides ᐧ Itamar Srulovich ᐧ Bryant Terry ᐧ Patricia Trujillo ᐧ Darryl Lorenzo Wellington ᐧ Colson Whitehead ᐧ Don Winslow ᐧ Lawrence Wright

Infinity lies between the lines.