Dear Festival Friends,

Santa Fe’s fabled blue skies and fresh air inspire many festivalgoers to take a deeper dive into the city and northern New Mexico. The Festival’s Literary Day Trips provide a chance to join an author and learn something new while experiencing some of the area’s cultural treasures and spectacular landscapes.

Two writing workshops are being offered on Monday, May 20. Writing in the Wild will be led by legendary writing teacher and bestselling author Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) and her friend and critically acclaimed author Katie Arnold (Running Home and her latest, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World), who also happens to have won the Leadville 100 and set course records from 5K to 100K. Workshop participants will explore the connection between silence, movement, nature, and their imaginations. “Walking through the natural world is a form of story gathering and telling, as well as a moving meditation,” explains Arnold. “The deeper one goes into the silence of forest and mountains, the deeper one goes into the mind.” To join Natalie and Katie to walk the trails in search of ideas and inspiration, sign up here:  www.katiearnold.net/events.

If food writing is more your thing, join award-winning author, geographer, and environmental anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva in her Food Memoir Workshop for an afternoon of snacks and writing. Whether your goal is to write restaurant reviews, reflections on your food memories, or the life history of a family recipe, get ready to cook up some piquant prose with La Cerva, whose book Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food was recommended by The New York Times in its 2020 Summer Reading List. All levels of writers welcome. For more information and to sign up, go to www.ginaraelc.com.

If you’re intrigued by Santa Fe history, you can do no better than the School for Advanced Research, which will host four Literary Tours at its beautiful in-town campus—two on Friday, May 17, and two on Monday, May 20. Walking through the campus, your guide will tell you about the history of the writers that have visited, worked at, or been involved in projects at SAR, including such luminaries as Alice Corbin Henderson, N. Scott Momaday, Witter Bynner, Fray Angélico Chávez, Peggy Pond Church, Will Shuster, and Rina Swentzell.

The Monday sessions will include lunch and author readings by Diné author and filmmaker Ramona Emerson, Santa Fe poet laureate Tommy Archuleta, and poet and performer Natachee Momaday Gray. These sessions are not to be missed.

To sign up, go to www.sarweb.org/dates or call Kat Bernhardt: bernhardt@sarsf.org, 505-954-7230.

For a complete list of community events and Day Trips, go to the Festival website: sfinternationallitfest.org.

This festival would not be possible without the generous support of the Gale Family Foundation, Santa Fe Tourism, and so many other donors and supporters. We couldn’t be more grateful to everyone who bought tickets, made tax-deductible contributions, and attended the Festival in 2023. We hope you’ll want to get even more involved this year. Please consider making a contribution below, no matter the size. It means everything to us!

Donations are tax-deductible