Dear Festival Friends,

Dylan Thomas said, “The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.” Since the Festival began, it’s been our honor to host many writers who have quietly changed the world, poem by poem. April is Poetry Month, and the perfect time to appreciate the amazing, far-too-unsung poets who will be joining us at the Festival next month.

• As we announced a few weeks ago, Arthur Sze will be back by popular demand. Since his last appearance at the Festival, in 2024, he’s gotten an impressive new job: U.S. poet laureate. The honor hasn’t kept him too busy to come out with a new book earlier this month: Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry.

• Sze’s predecessor as the nation’s poet laureate, Ada Limón, held the title from 2022 to 2025. She has won a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and countless literary awards and was one of Time’s 2024 Women of the Year. “Despite all of this,” cracked The New York Times, “she’s a very fine poet.” Limón’s latest collection, Startlement, was published last fall, and her new book, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, came out earlier this month.

• Jake Skeets is poet laureate of the Navajo Nation. His 2019 debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, won the American Book Award and was selected for the National Poetry Series. Harvard Review captured the book’s haunting power: “A strange and uncanny poetic landscape emerges, one in which a dead cactus conceals a burrowing owl, where wild rose and sego lily lead us to a noisy truck radio.” Skeets’s latest collection, Horses, was published in March.

• Rick Barot examines big topics, such as colonialism and the immigrant experience, through a personal lens. His 2020 collection The Galleons, which pays homage to his Filipino American family, was long-listed for the National Book Award and named one of the New York Public Library’s best books of the year. McSweeney’s described his latest book of poems, Moving the Bones, as “the work of a consummate artist at the height of his powers.”

• Ama Codjoe is the author of the poetry collection Bluest Nude, which Ada Limón described as “pulsating with both grief and beauty.” It won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Her collection Blood of the Air won the 2020 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Codjoe won the 2023 Whiting Award and the 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Santa Fe’s current poet laureate, Tommy Archuleta, works as a therapist at The Life Link, a nonprofit agency that has served the unhoused and migrant communities of our hometown for more than twenty years. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Diane Seuss called his 2023 debut collection, Susto, “a whittled bone of a book, seething with marrow.”

• Willow Koseoglu is Santa Fe’s new youth poet laureate. The seventeen-year-old junior at the Academy for Technology and the Classics received the honor just a few days ago and said, in a text message to a local reporter, “I’m not sure it’s sunk in yet!” We’re so happy she’ll be joining us at the Festival.

COMMUNITY NEWS

Congratulations to Festival author Maria Semple, whose joyful and hilarious new book, Go Gentle, was recently selected for Oprah’s Book Club. “A whirlwind of secret rendezvous and a new chance at love,” Oprah called it. “This is one wild ride of a story.”

Join us Wednesdays at Sky Cinemas

Throughout April and May, the Festival is hosting, with Santa Fe’s Sky Cinemas, a series of films featuring the work of 2026 Festival authors. The series continues on Wednesday, April 22, with Border South, featuring Jason De León, author of the National Book Award–winning Soldiers and Kings. Future films include Groundhog Day, co-written by Danny Rubin, and No Straight Lines, featuring cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Border South plays at 6:30 at Sky Cinemas in the Railyard. Click here for more info.

IMPORTANT PSA!

We have recently learned of someone impersonating the Festival by using a fake Gmail address to invite writers to attend. If you receive this type of email, please forward it to us at once and do not reply. We will never ask authors for money to participate in the Festival. Quite the opposite—we love paying our authors!

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Juliet Erickson

Andrea Fellows Fineberg | Jenny Kimball

James McGrath Morris | Carmella Padilla

Jenna Scanlan | Mary Sloane

Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant