Dear Festival Friends,

When asked in a 2020 interview his primary objective as an author, Kiese Laymon said, “I want people to feel like they are reading something they maybe never read before, but they need it … I want to hit people in the chest.”

He certainly does that. Laymon’s innovative, raw, and often hilarious work is a slug to the solar plexus. So honest he can make you squirm, he confronts all the tricky issues. Race and family, body image and shame, poverty and politics—he never hesitates to jump right in. His clear-eyed perceptiveness defines his acclaimed memoir Heavy, about growing up as the only child of a complicated and brilliant mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence to his suspension from college (for sneaking The Red Badge of Courage past the library scanner) to his trek to New York as a young professor, Laymon charts his complex relationships with his mother, his grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and gambling. Through it all, he manages to be savagely funny. “In Jackson,” he writes, “getting a whupping was so much gentler than getting a beating, and getting a beating was actually ticklish compared to getting beat the fuck up.” 

Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in nonfiction, and Laymon began his acceptance speech by giving the award to his mother in thanks for teaching him how to write and, more crucially, teaching him how important it is to revise. (Kids, listen to your mothers!) Heavy was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years and one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. Kirkus called it “a dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways.” Audible chose the narrated version, read by the author, as its 2018 Audiobook of the Year.

Laymon is also the author of the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and the novel Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award and is being adapted into a television series by Trevor Noah. His latest book, for young readers, is City Summer, Country Summer, about three boys who form a deep connection during a summer spent down south. It was named a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book, and NPR called it “lovely and poignant.”

We’re so honored that Laymon will be joining us at the Festival in just ten days! Until then, check out his powerful new Vanity Fair essay. It’ll hit you in the chest.

Community News

Congrats to iconic Weekend Edition Saturday host and 2026 Festival author Scott Simon, who has a new memoir out this week: Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known. He discusses the book with its illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, on his Substack, Open Book.

Award-winning novelist, essayist, poet, and 2026 Festival author Ocean Vuong is also a gifted photographer. An exhibition of his photos depicting immigrant and working-class life in America will be on display at CENTER, in Santa Fe, from May 29 to June 28, with a preview to be held the Saturday and Sunday of Festival weekend, May 16–17. Click here for information.

Throughout April and May, the Festival has been hosting, with Santa Fe’s Sky Cinemas, a series of films featuring the work of 2026 Festival authors. The series continues Wednesday, May 6, with Groundhog Day, the iconic comedy starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell and co-written by Danny Rubin, and concludes next week with No Straight Lines, featuring cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Groundhog Day plays at 6:30 at Sky Cinemas in the Railyard. Click here for more info.

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