Festival Authors and Moderators

Hakim Bellamy is the quintessential citizen poet. “Poetry is community,” he has said. Bellamy was honored as the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque, serving from 2012 to 2014. He was deputy director of the city’s Department of Arts & Culture and is a member of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival’s Board of Directors. Bellamy is a practicing attorney as well as 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. His latest collection, Commissions y Corridos (2021), offers poems that celebrate New Mexico culture, bearing witness individually and inspiring collective purpose.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné, of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). Bitsui is the author of, most recently, The Next Sky (2026), as well as Shapeshift (2003), Flood Song (2009), and Dissolve (2018). His honors include a Lannan Foundation Poetry Fellowship and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts and joined the faculty at Northern Arizona University in the fall of 2019.

Elizabeth Barr Bryant is the great-grandniece of early-twentieth-century Santa Fe artist Dorothy Newkirk Stewart and the author of the forthcoming biography Dorothy Stewart: Santa Fe Artist and Printmaker. Bryant’s research began when she discovered an old family trunk of Stewart’s letters and block prints signed “DNS.” To uncover Stewart’s artistic legacy, Bryant consulted archives, family photographs, and oral histories across New Mexico and Mexico. She conducted interviews with relatives and others who remembered Stewart and drew extensively from the Dorothy Stewart Collection at the New Mexico Museum of Art, as well as materials preserved by Stewart’s longtime companion Maria Chabot. Through her work, Bryant seeks to honor Stewart’s artistic achievements and enduring connection to Santa Fe.

Ana Castillo is a celebrated novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, poet, and playwright. Her 1993 novel So Far from God received critical acclaim—Barbara Kingsolver wrote in the L.A. Times that it was “as readable as a teen-aged sister’s secret diary—and as impossible to resist.” Castillo’s publications include Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home (2023), Lambda Literary Award winners Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo and Me (2017) and Give It to Me (2014), Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), and Sapogonia (1990), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Castillo has held endowed chair positions at Dominican and DePaul Universities and was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT. A recipient of NEA awards in fiction and poetry, she received the PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018 and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2022.

Few contemporary poets have achieved Billy Collins’s combination of critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Serving as United States poet laureate from 2001 to 2003 and New York State poet laureate from 2004 to 2006, Collins is known for an accessible, conversational style that grounds everyday observations before shifting into unexpected irony or quiet lyricism. Among his many acclaimed collections are The Art of Drowning, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Picnic, Lightning, recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems remains a major 21st-century bestseller. A former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY), Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. He has been recognized as a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.”

Tina Cordova is a seventh-generation native New Mexican born and raised in the small town of Tularosa, in south-central New Mexico. In 2005, Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium with the late Fred Tyler. The mission of the TBDC is to bring attention to the negative health effects suffered by the unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated victims of the world’s first nuclear blast, which took place at the Trinity Site, fifty miles from her hometown. Lois Lipman’s 2023 documentary film First We Bombed New Mexico documents Cordova’s efforts to obtain an apology and compensation from the federal government for the mostly Native American and Hispanic communities in New Mexico who were harmed by radiation fallout from the Trinity bomb.

David Correia is a writer and professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of New Mexico. His work examines land speculation, labor struggle, and the making of America. Through his monographs—Properties of Violence (2013), An Enemy Such as This (2022), and Set the Earth on Fire (2024)—Correia brings to life the forgotten struggles of working people in rural America. Supported by a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a Henry Belin du Pont Fellowship, and the Adele Hast Fellowship in American History, among others, his writing transports readers into places and pasts shaped by violent struggles for land and livelihoods. Correia’s work asks who has the right to claim the earth, demonstrating how property claims are never settled, deeds are never quiet, and resistance is always present.

Clayton Dalton’s work focuses on global humanitarian crises, the impact of climate change on human health, the corporate financialization of American healthcare, the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs, and the interdependence of the world around and within us. Dalton has received grants and fellowships from UC Berkeley, as a Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellow, the National Institute for Healthcare Management, and Yaddo. In 2025, he was a MacDowell Fellow in Literature and was awarded the Sylvia Canfield Winn Fellowship and the Calderwood Journalism Fellowship. Dalton has a medical degree from Columbia University, completed residency training at Harvard, and practices in rural emergency departments in the Southwest. He is at work on two book projects: A History of Our Present Illness and An Atlas of Human Suffering. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Lion’s Roar, Salon, and The New Republic.

Hernan Diaz is the New York Times bestselling author of In the Distance, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Trust, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, and named one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. An acclaimed voice in contemporary American literature, Diaz engages audiences through witty conversations about foreignness, genre theory, literary history, and how research is an act of reading. In its starred review of his new book Ply, released in September, Library Journal writes, “Diaz brilliantly envisions how love, trust, and loyalty can remain when freedom and justice have collapsed.” He has received the John Updike Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.

Described as a “cultural polymath” by The Guardian, Ekow Eshun has been at the heart of international creative culture for several decades, curating exhibitions, authoring books, presenting documentaries, and chairing high-profile lectures. His work addresses identity, style, masculinity, art, and culture. Author of The Strangers, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, Eshun was the first Black editor of a major magazine in the UK (Arena Magazine, 1997) and the first Black director of a major arts organization (Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, 2005–2010). As chairman of the commissioning group for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, he leads one of the world’s most famous public art projects. Eshun will be coming to the Santa Fe International Literary Festival as part of a joint partnership with SITE Santa Fe, where he will be the curator of the 13th SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, opening June 11, 2027.

Richard Flanagan, “considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation” (The Economist), is the author of eight novels and nine books of nonfiction. Flanagan won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Book Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. His most recent work, Question 7—blending history, philosophical essay, and memoir—was a finalist for the Prix Femina Étranger and won the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize, making Flanagan the first and only author ever to receive both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford. The Washington Post has described him as “one of our greatest living novelists,” and Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books called him “among the most versatile writers in the English language.” Flanagan’s fiction and nonfiction explore Australian history, family, politics, the environment, and the relationship between individual lives and larger historical forces.

Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests include contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, and prison abolition. Her forthcoming memoir Between the River and the Railroad Tracks (November 2026) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it a “brilliant account of growing up in a majority-Black Ohio neighborhood in the 1970s [and] a stirring self-portrait.” A MacArthur Fellow, she is the author Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) and winner of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.

Nancy Foley’s first novel, I Am Agatha (2026), was described by Publishers Weekly as “a colorful portrait of a headstrong artist.” Loosely inspired by the life of artist Agnes Martin, the book follows a reclusive artist who withdraws to rural New Mexico to live on her own terms. The irascible Agatha learns new ways to fathom life, death, and her own heart. Shelf Awareness called Foley’s book “an arresting, darkly funny, and heartrending consideration of life, love, and endings.” Booklist, in a starred review, praised Foley for crafting “a spare and skillful story, giving Agatha a unique narrative voice that lets the sarcastic yet vulnerable narrator reveal herself at her own pace.” Raised in New Mexico, Foley has held a literary residency at Hedgebrook’s Writer-in-Residence Program and divides her time between Santa Fe and Hood River, Oregon.

Roxane Gay has authored six critically acclaimed books, including essay and short story collections and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), hailed by The New York Times as “luminous … intellectually rigorous and deeply moving.” Booklist recommends her 2023 essay collection Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticisms, and Minding Other People’s Business as a must-read “for everyone interested in reading intellectual, accessible, and important takes on timely topics.” A Guggenheim Fellow, Gay is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and McSweeney’s. In 2016, Gay and poet Yona Harvey became the first Black women lead writers for a Marvel series with Black Panther: World of Wakanda. Gay served as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and currently works on film and television projects while running her own publishing imprint, Roxane Gay Books.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the southwestern desert. She is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. The Los Angeles Times called her novel Salt Bones (2025) “a triumph … one of the most masterful marriages of horror, mystery, thriller and literary writing.” It was a 2025 Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Book Riot Best Mystery & Thriller of the Year, a Library Journal Stellar Selection, and an American Library Association Best Book of the Year. Her newest novel, The Sleeping Sisters (2026), was praised by T. Kingfisher as “House of Spirits meets The Wire in this marvelously strange story of murder and motherhood.” Givhan lives in New Mexico.

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.

Myrriah Gómez is from the Pojoaque Valley, in northern New Mexico. She is the author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos (2022), which was awarded a Southwest Book Award and an International Latino Book Award. She earned her doctorate in English with an emphasis in Latina/o literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio and was a 2011 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. In 2015 she was awarded the Faculty of Color Award for Teaching by the UNM Project for New Mexico Graduates of Color. Gómez is currently an associate professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico, where she directs the Conexiones-Spain study abroad program in Cáceres, Spain. She is the director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute at UNM and serves as faculty coordinator for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at UNM.

Laurence Gonzales is a professional explorer, rooted in what he calls a “compulsion to write.” Recognized by Kirkus as “a caring, questioning man with a dry wit and big heart,” Gonzales is the author of many bestselling books, including One Zero Charlie (1993), Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (2003), Lucy (2010), Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience (2012), and Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (2014). His biography Isolato: An Intimate Portrait of Cormac McCarthy will be published in May 2027. Gonzales has received a Journalism Fellowship from the Santa Fe Institute, where he served for four years as a Miller Distinguished Scholar. He has won two National Magazine Awards, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Montaigne Medal from the Eric Hoffer Society, and the Eric Hoffer Award in both 2018 and 2019.

Alicia Inez Guzmán was raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, on land passed down through many generations of women. In Truchas, there is a word—querencia—which means love of homeland. This querencia is why Guzmán weaves histories of place, identity, and land use into nearly all of her writing, which combines two passions: arts and culture writing and investigative journalism. Guzmán writes about the nuclear weapons industry in New Mexico, and her work can be found in Searchlight NM, The Nation, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and High Country News. Guzmán’s awards include a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2021 Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism, and a 2024 MOLLY National Journalism Prize in investigative journalism.

Adelma Aurora’s first book, Resolana: A New Mexico Family’s Memoir of Place (2027), shares the transformative journey of counterculture homesteaders drawn to northern New Mexico in the 1970s. From idealistic hippie beginnings and communal living to heartbreak, displacement, and return, Resolana follows a family tested by tragedy yet sustained by the land. “In this graceful love letter to a place,” writes acclaimed author Hampton Sides, “and to the spirit of place, Adelma Aurora captures the rhythms of rural northern New Mexico in lush and luxuriant prose … Resolana is a book to be taken in slowly, and savored.” Trained as an educational anthropologist, Aurora supports community-based learning through her work. She has collaborated with arts organizations across the U.S., founded and co-directed Resolana Farms, a land-based creative residency program in the village of Coyote, and serves as the New Mexico author consultant for the Santa Fe International Literary Festival.

Marlon James captivates us with his novels, including A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which made him the first Jamaican author to receive the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. It also won the American Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was included among The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. James’s debut novel, John Crow’s Devil (2005), was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The Book of Night Women (2009) won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. The New York Times calls James’s new book The Disappearers “a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.”

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of more than thirty-five publications, including novels, novellas, collections, and comic books. An English professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and an NEA Fellowship recipient, Jones has earned numerous honors, including the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the L.A. Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel. Library Journal praised The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) as “grief horror, portraying the mourning of a land and a people,” and bestselling science fiction author Daniel Kraus called it “very likely Jones’s masterpiece,” adding, “For me and vampires, there is Stoker, there is Rice, and now there is Jones.” His recently released Off the Reservation is the sequel to his 2020 bestseller The Only Good Indians, which Stephen King called “thrilling, literate, scary, [and] immersive.”

New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, and Freedom, Sebastian Junger is also an acclaimed documentary film director, a correspondent for ABC News, and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. He is the winner of the Peabody Award, the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and the SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism. Junger’s courageous accounting of international news and global conflict zones engages audiences with vivid and emotionally compelling portraits of war and its aftermath. A departure from much of his previous work as a journalist and documentarian, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (2024) is a deeply personal story examining mortality and spirituality. In its review, The Times of London wrote that “few other writers have such passion for granular detail, intellectual heft and boundless curiosity.”

Called “one of our most poignant and moving contemporary novelists” by Vogue, Lily King is the author of the bestselling novels Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, which was named a top ten book of 2020 by The Washington Post. Publishers Weekly calls King “a master psychological portraitist,” and Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, places her “firmly in the top rank of our most accomplished novelists.” The author of six novels and a story collection, she brings deft characterization and emotional precision to stories that illuminate the inner workings of life’s most complicated relationships. Her most recent novel, Heart the Lover, an instant New York Times bestseller, was long-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul and immigrated to Queens at age seven. Her fiction “explores the most fundamental crisis of immigrants’ children: how to bridge a generation gap so wide it is measured in oceans,” notes The Observer. Her national bestselling debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), was named a top ten book of the year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Her second novel, Pachinko (2017), about a Korean family that immigrates to Japan, has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and named one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her latest book, American Hagwon (Cardinal/HBG), released in September, has been called “a gift to her readers” by Kirkus in its starred review.

Lee Chia-Ying is the author of three acclaimed short story collections. Her debut novel, A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven, has received multiple literary awards in Taiwan and is being translated into more than twenty languages; the English version will be published in January 2027. Chia-Ying, who splits her time between Boston and Taipei, will be coming to the Santa Fe International Literary Festival as part of a joint partnership between the Taiwan Academy, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, in Houston, and the Santa Fe Art Institute, where she will be a 2027 Writer in Residence.

Jared Lemus is a Guatemalan American author whose work explores Hispanic culture and contemporary social and political issues. His debut short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody (2025), won the 2026 PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was described by Publishers Weekly as “assured … These clear-eyed stories ache with life.” Lemus’s work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, and Story, among others. He is the recipient of the 2021 Nordan-Kinder Award in Fiction, served as a Colgate Writers Conference fellow, and was a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar. His first novel, Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring, will be published by Ecco in April 2027. Lemus holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, has been the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Memphis.

Mara Liasson is the senior national political correspondent for NPR. Her reports can be heard regularly on NPR’s award-winning newsmagazine programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Liasson provides extensive coverage of politics and policy from Washington, D.C.—focusing on the White House and Congress—and also reports on political trends beyond the Beltway. She joined NPR in 1985 as a general assignment reporter and newscaster, later taking a leave of absence to attend Columbia University as a recipient of a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism. Before joining NPR, Liasson was a freelance radio and television reporter in San Francisco, a managing editor and anchor of the California Public Radio nightly news program California Edition, and a print journalist for The Vineyard Gazette, on Martha’s Vineyard. She holds a bachelor’s degree in American history from Brown University.

Dianne C. Luce, co-founder and past president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, is a leading scholar of McCarthy’s writing, recognized for her extensive archival research into his career and his novels. Her work traces the creative evolution of an American author with a vision all his own. In addition to Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy’s Writing Life, 1959–1974 (2023), Luce is the author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (2008) and co-editor of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (1999) and A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (2001).

Andri Magnason works in many genres—from poetry and nonfiction to children’s books and science fiction—and is also a playwright and documentary filmmaker. His 2021 book On Time and Water, translated into thirty-plus languages, was called “a letter of farewell to lost worlds and a passionate appeal to preserve what remains” by novelist Anuradha Roy. In 2026 it was adapted into a National Geographic documentary directed by Oscar nominee Sara Dosa. Magnason collaborates with artists including Yo Yo Ma, the Kronos Quartet, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Högni, and Múm. In architecture he has worked with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and with SAP on the Lavaforming project for the 2025 Venice Biennale. He is the only writer to win the Icelandic Literary Award in every category. His other honors include the Grand Prix l’Imaginaire; a Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation for LoveStar; and Italy’s Tiziano Terzani Prize. Magnason lives in Reykjavík.

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.

One of this country’s most versatile and accomplished writers, Joyce Carol Oates has penned novels, short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and memoirs. Her remarkable literary industry—including as editor and anthologist—spans forms, themes, and genres. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., “A future archaeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.” In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal. Among her notable novels are Them (National Book Award, 1970); The Falls (Prix Femina, 2005); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); The Accursed (2013); A Book of American Martyrs (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2017); and 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister (Prix Fitzgerald, 2024). Oates’s 2025 novel Fox received starred reviews, and in 2026 she released her landmark fiftieth short story collection, The Frenzy. Her forthcoming collection The Massacre at Mount Pitcairn releases in January 2027.

Lori Ostlund’s captivating stories explore compassion, loneliness, and the violence that impacts women and the LGBTQ+ community. The Washington Post included her book Are You Happy? among its 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2025, and Electric Literature named it one of the five best story collections of the year. It was a finalist for the California Book Award in Fiction and short-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Ostlund’s debut, The Bigness of the World (2009), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Her 2015 novel After the Parade was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. NewPages celebrates Ostlund for her “keen insight into human behavior that allows the reader to recognize themselves in characters with whom, outwardly, they have absolutely nothing in common.

Carmella Padilla is a journalist, author, and editor who explores intersections in art, culture, and history in New Mexico and beyond. Her books include A Red Like No Other: How Cochineal Colored the World, co-edited with Dr. Barbara Anderson and winner of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for distinguished scholarship in art history; 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. Her 2025 book, Printing the Spirit: Gustave Baumann’s Santos, a collaboration with printer Thomas Leech, brings a century-old project to the page and was awarded the 2026 Historical Society of New Mexico’s Ralph Emerson Twitchell Award for a significant contribution to the creative arts and New Mexico history.

A native Santa Fean, Padilla co-founded the Santa Fe International Literary Festival and is a recipient of the 2009 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the 1996 Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the 2026 Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Exceptional Contribution to the Preservation and Understanding of Santa Fe history. Her current projects include a book on twentieth-century New Mexican furniture and a memoir.

Elizabeth Partridge is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen books for young readers and adults, including picture book biographies and visual histories about iconic artists. Her works include the National Book Award finalist This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie (2002) and the Printz Honor book John Lennon: All I Want Is the Truth (2005). The New York Times recognized her 2022 book Seen and Unseen as “ingeniously designed,” striking “an ideal balance” in its portrayal of Japanese American incarceration. Her honors include the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal, and the BolognaRagazzi Award for Photography. The granddaughter of Imogen Cunningham and goddaughter of Dorothea Lange, Partridge grew up surrounded by photographs, inspiring her to bear witness during important and difficult times in American history through her books.

Stacey Peebles is the H. W. Stodghill Jr. and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of English, chair of Film Studies, and chair of the Doctrina Lux Mentis program at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky. Her research covers the representation of war and violence in literature and film, the work of American author Cormac McCarthy, film adaptation, and the Western. She has given keynote addresses or sponsored lectures on these topics in Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States. Peebles has edited The Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010 and is the president of the Cormac McCarthy Society.

Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona, who was recently appointed Tucson poet laureate and the recipient of a 2026 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of the books Reckon (2026), Sonoran Strange (2015), and the ongoing NoVoGRAFíAS series, Phillips works to find new ways for poetry to engage with the wider world. A bilingual poet, performer, educator, and DJ, he tours throughout the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and beyond. Phillips served as co-founder and co-director of Spoken Futures Inc., whose programs have included the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, and currently works as a teaching artist with the University of Arizona Poetry Center and with schools across the United States.

Andrew Porter has been recognized by NPR as “one of the United States’ most reliably great fiction writers.” His books include The Theory of Light and Matter (2008), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; In Between Days (2012), named the San Antonio Express-News’s Fictional Work of the Year; The Disappeared (2023), long-listed for the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and The Imagined Life (2025), long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The New Yorker, and Esquire. His short story collection The Letters will be released in April 2027. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Porter is a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University, in San Antonio.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven collections of poetry, including Animal Eye, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize; Nightingale, winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award for Poetry; and West: A Translation, long-listed for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association’s Reading the West Book Award. Her nonfiction work includes a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam and Appropriate: A Provocation. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program and directs the American West Center. Between 2017 and 2022 she served as Utah’s poet laureate, receiving a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Ben Rhodes served as a speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to President Obama from 2009 to 2017. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers: The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018), After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made (2022), and All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches (2026). Rhodes’s writings address American foreign policy, national security, democracy, and the rise of authoritarianism. He is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World, and a contributor for MS NOW. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs. “At a time of moral and political drift,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ayad Akhtar, “Ben Rhodes reminds us what American greatness actually sounds like, and what it means.”

Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling speculative fiction writer whose award-winning short stories and novels include the Star Wars novel Reign of the Empire (2026), her Between Earth and Sky trilogy (2020–2024), and the children’s book Race to the Sun (2020). Roanhorse was the guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 and a contributor to The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. A graduate of Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, and the UNM School of Law, Roanhorse has taught workshops for Clarion, Tin House, and Lighthouse and has written for Marvel comics and games. Her TV writing includes FX’s A Murder at the End of the World and the Marvel series Echo for Disney+, and her work has been optioned by Paramount, Amazon Studios, Netflix, and AMC Studios.

Patti Smith is the author of the 2010 National Book Award winner Just Kids as well as Woolgathering, M Train, Year of the Monkey, and Collected Lyrics. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the 100 best albums of all time. Her global exhibitions include Strange Messenger, Land 250, Camera Solo, and Evidence. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture named Smith a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Smith is also the recipient of the ASCAP Founders Award, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, and France’s Legion d’Honneur. Her 2025 memoir Bread of Angels became a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by Time, NPR, and The New Yorker.

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York–based teacher, journalist, author, and the inaugural George R. R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is the author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls (2016) and A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food & Family (2011). She co-created the short story anthology Anonymous Sex (2022) and was editor of Singapore Noir (2014). Tan has been a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, InStyle, and the Baltimore Sun. Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Washington Post. She has held residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and the Studios of Key West. A member of the Asian American Journalists Association, Tan served on its national board for seven years. She is co-editor of Key West Noir, forthcoming in March 2027.