2023 Featured Authors

Hakim Bellamy

Former Albuquerque Poet Laureate and cultural activist

  • 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.

Jennifer Egan

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

  • 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.

Priyanka Kumar

Award-winning essayist & author of Conversations with Birds

  • 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.

Beth Macy

Celebrated journalist and author 
of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus

  • 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.

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

New York Times bestselling author of Spillover

  • 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.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

National Book Award finalist for The Man Who Could Move Clouds

  • 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.

David Treuer

National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Rez Life

  • 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.

Gillian Flynn

Bestselling author of the runaway hits Gone Girl & Sharp Objects

  • 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.

Ed Yong

Pulitzer Prize–winning
science writer

  • 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.

Hampton Sides

Bestselling master of
narrative history

  • 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.

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.

Douglas Preston

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

Namwali Serpell

Award-winning author of The Old Drift  and The Furrows

  • 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.

John Irving

Legendary author of The
World According to Garp

  • 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.

Kathleen McCleery

Award-winning PBS correspondent and producer

  • 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.

Patricia Trujillo

Writer, editor, educator,
and feminist scholar

  • 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.

Colum McCann

National Book Award winner
for Let the Great World Spin

  • 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.

Denise Chávez

Fronteriza writer, activist,
and  New Mexico treasure

  • 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.

Laura Furman

Professor emerita, novelist, memoirist, and short story writer

  • 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.

Natachee Momaday Gray

Poet, Santa Fe native, and narradora indígena

  • 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.

Don J. Usner

New Mexico author-photographer,
narrating generations of place

  • 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.

Lucy Lippard

Acclaimed art and land activist,
author of Galisteo Basin histories

  • 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.

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.

Stanley Crawford

Beloved author of the farm classics
Mayordomo & A Garlic Testament

  • 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.

Deborah Taffa

Forthcoming memoirist and director of creative writing at IAIA

  • 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.

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

Critically acclaimed memoirist and essayist

  • 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.

Estevan Rael-Gálvez

Cultural anthropologist, historian, and creative strategist

  • 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.

Alexander Parsons

Bestselling novelist and
professor of creative writing

  • 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.

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

Author of the bestselling 
Kevin Kerney crime novels 

  • 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.

Laila Lalami

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

  • 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.

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 and her husband split their time between Scottsdale, Arizona, and Santa Fe.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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

  • 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.

Sandra Blakeslee

New York Times
science writer and author

  • 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.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Acclaimed author of 17 books including The Devil’s Highway 

  • 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.

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

James Beard Award Winner and author of over 19 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 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.

Roshi Joan Halifax

Buddhist teacher, social and environmental activist, and author

  • 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.

Sally Denton

Bestselling investigative journalist  and author of The Colony

  • 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.

Yvon Chouinard

Legendary Patagonia founder, adventurer, activist, and author

  • 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.

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