2024 Featured Authors

Jesmyn Ward

Two-time National Book Award winner and bestselling author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend

  • JESMYN WARD, novelist and nonfiction author, has been called “the new Toni Morrison” by the American Booksellers Association. The MacArthur “genius” grant recipient’s novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011 and 2017, respectively, making her the first woman and the first person of color to win the award twice. Sing was also nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and named one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time. Her 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ward’s first historical novel, Let Us Descend (2023), an instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, is informed by Ward’s personal experience of loss to violent or untimely deaths. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University.

David Grann

Bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, and
The Lost City of Z

  • DAVID GRANN is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of nonfiction titles including the National Book Award finalist Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI and The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. Grann has been called “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading,” with four New Yorker articles adapted for the screen, including Trial by Fire, The Old Man and the Gun, and The White Darkness. The screen adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio. His writing has appeared in The Best American Crime Writing, The New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He has earned honors including a George Polk Award, a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, and a Cullman Fellowship. He lives with his family in New York.

Lynsey Addario

Legendary conflict photographer and author of the bestselling memoir It’s What I Do

  • LYNSEY ADDARIO is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir It’s What I Do and a celebrated photojournalist covering conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She regularly photographs for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time and has been named by American Photo Magazine one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years. Addario was the official photographer for the Nobel Peace Center’s 10th Peace Prize Exhibition and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award for best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines and books. She was also part of the New York Times team to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In 2018 she published her first solo collection of photography, Of Love and War. She lives in London.

Julia Alvarez

Beloved bestselling author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies

  • JULIA ALVAREZ is the author of such acclaimed novels as How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, and Afterlife. Her other work includes collections of poems (Homecoming, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (Something to Declare, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti), and numerous books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, Finding Miracles, Return to Sender, and Where Do They Go?). Alvarez was born in New York City but spent the early years of her life in the Dominican Republic with her family. In 2013 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, and she has received the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award.

Kai Bird

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Robert Oppenheimer and others

  • Kai Bird won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with the late Martin J. Sherwin), which was adapted into Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer. His most recent book, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, was also a New York Times bestseller. Bird chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978 and has written biographies of Jimmy Carter, John J. McCloy, and the brothers McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. He’s won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and is the executive director and distinguished lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Revered investigative journalist for The New Yorker and author of Empire of Pain, Say Nothing, and Rogues

  • PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of five books of award-winning journalism. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, a New York Times bestseller, received the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize, among others. His reporting on the Sacklers inspired the 2023 hit Netflix series Painkiller, the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary The Crime of the Century, and the Oscar-nominated All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Keefe’s international bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal and was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the decade. Say Nothing has been adapted into an Apple+ series, scheduled to premiere in spring 2024. His latest book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, is a collection of his New Yorker articles.

Anne Lamott

Perennial New York Times bestselling author of Bird by Bird and Help, Thanks, Wow

  • ANNE LAMOTT writes and speaks about subjects that begin with capital letters: Alcoholism, Motherhood, Jesus. Her forthcoming book Somehow: Thoughts on Love, which will be published by Riverhead Books in April 2024, explores the transformative power that love has in our lives, how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. She is the author of seven novels and has written several bestselling books of nonfiction, including the classic Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. She has also authored several collections of autobiographical essays on faith, including Grace (Eventually). In addition, she has written the bestsellers Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers; Hallelujah Anyway; and Dusk, Night, Dawn. Lamott is the recipient of numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Hakim Bellamy

Former Albuquerque poet laureate and cultural activist

  • HAKIM BELLAMY has held the titles of inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque (2012–2014), National Poetry Slam champion, and creative writing chair at New Mexico School for the Arts. His poetry has been published on the Albuquerque Convention Center, on the outside of a library, in inner-city buses, and in numerous anthologies. Bellamy has received the Career Achievement Award from the University of New Mexico’s Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize for his work as a community organizer and journalist, and in 2017 he was named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. He has served as the on-air television host for New Mexico PBS’s ¡Colores! program for three years, was deputy director of the City of Albuquerque Department of Arts and Culture from 2018 to 2022, and is the founding president of Beyond Poetry LLC. He is currently pursuing a law degree at the University of New Mexico School of Law.

William deBuys

Author, conservationist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and New Mexico legend

  • WILLIAM DEBUYS is the author of ten books, the most recent of which, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, completes a trilogy that includes The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures and A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. His River of Traps (with photographer Alex Harris) was a Pulitzer nonfiction finalist in 1991. He co-wrote the feature documentary, The Colorado with director Murat Eyuboglu, and has been a Kluge Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress (2018), a Guggenheim Fellow (2008–2009), and a Lyndhurst Fellow (1986–1988). He lives and writes on the farm he has tended since 1976 in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Bryan Curtis

Journalist, podcast host, editor at large

  • BRYAN CURTIS is editor at large of the Los Angeles–based website and podcast network The Ringer. He writes about the media and hosts The Ringer’s twice-weekly podcast The Press Box, where he examines how news is made and conducts long-form interviews with journalists, novelists, and TV personalities. He has been a national correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a columnist at Slate, Texas Monthly, Grantland, and Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine. His stories have appeared in the annual Best American Sports Writing and Best American Travel Writing anthologies.

Anthony Doerr

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land

  • ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the novels About Grace, All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and Cloud Cuckoo Land, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award, as well as the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s work has won five O. Henry Prizes, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays, among other places, and has been translated into more than forty languages. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and the 2010 Story Prize. All the Light We Cannot See, which was recently adapted into the Netflix series of the same name, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and remained on the Times bestseller list for more than two hundred weeks. Doerr lives in Idaho.

Ramona Emerson

Celebrated debut novelist and filmmaker

  • RAMONA EMERSON is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. Her debut novel, 2023’s Shutter, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and won the Lefty Award for Best First Novel. Shutter was also a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel. Emerson has a BA in media arts from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Albuquerque, where she and her husband, the producer Kelly Byars, run the production company Reel Indian Pictures.

Jamie Figueroa

Critically acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and educator

  • JAMIE FIGUEROA is the author of the just-published memoir Mother Island and the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which was short-listed for the Reading the West Book Award and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was an Indie Next pick and a Good Morning America Must-Read Book of the Month, and was named a most anticipated debut of the year by Bustle, Electric Literature, The Millions, and Rumpus. A member of the faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Figueroa has published writing in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times, and the Boston Review. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation alum, she received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Scholar. Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.

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 has also contributed to the new collaborative novel Fourteen Days. She and her husband split their time between Scottsdale, Arizona, and Santa Fe.

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.

Buddhist teacher, social and environmental activist, and author

Roshi Joan Halifax

  • 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.

Hua Hsu

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner for the memoir Stay True

  • HUA HSU is the author of the memoir Stay True, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, as well as the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The Wall Street Journal hailed it as “a luminous and tender-hearted story … a nuanced and beautiful evocation of young adulthood in all its sloppy, exuberant glory. Stay True was one of Time’s Must-Read Books of the Year, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year, a Publishers Weekly best nonfiction book of the year, and a New Yorker best book of the year. Hsu has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017 and a contributor since 2014. He is also the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. He teaches at Bard College and has also taught at Harvard and Vassar College.

Cheryl Alters Jamison

Four-time James Beard Award winner and author of some twenty 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 twenty 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. Jamison is host of the Heating It Up radio show and is the narrator of the upcoming TV docuseries Santa Fe Foods. 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.

Demetria Martínez

Author of the now classic Mother Tongue

  • DEMETRIA MARTÍNEZ is a writer and poet based in La Ciénega, New Mexico. Her books include the widely translated novel Mother Tongue and the American Book Award–winning The Block Captain’s Daughter, as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poetry. Mother Tongue is partly based on Martínez’s work as a reporter covering the faith-based Sanctuary movement. In 1986 she accompanied a Lutheran minister to the U.S.–Mexico border, where he met two Salvadoran women fleeing U.S.-funded death squads and brought them to safety in Albuquerque. Martínez and the minister were charged with conspiracy against the U.S. government for aiding their entry. She faced 25 years in prison and $1.25 million in fines but was acquitted on First Amendment grounds after a 1988 trial. Her current works include translations of Spanish ballads by her grandfather Luis Martínez and Two Women Two Worlds, a poetic collaboration with writer Susan Sherman.

Ellen McGirt

Award-winning journalist and community builder

  • ELLEN McGIRT is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor in chief of Design Observer, an independent media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. McGirt established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published more than twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good.

James McGrath Morris

Prizewinning biographer and author of New York Times bestselling narrative nonfiction

  • JAMES McGRATH MORRIS is the author of Tony Hillerman: A Life, the first major biography of the groundbreaking mystery writer. Morris’s books also include the New York Times bestselling Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Hooks National Book Award; The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War; Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, which The Wall Street Journal deemed one of the five best books on American moguls and Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies; and The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism—a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He is one of the founders and past presidents of the Biographers International Organization and makes his home in Santa Fe.

Manuel Muñoz

MacArthur Fellow, short story master, educator

  • MANUEL MUÑOZ is the author of three collections of short stories: The Consequences, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and Zigzagger. His novel What You See in the Dark was published in 2011. Muñoz is a recipient of a 2023 MacArthur “genius” grant and the winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His stories have three times been awarded the O. Henry Prize and have twice appeared in the annual Best American Short Stories. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Zyzzyva, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, Muñoz is a professor at the University of Arizona, in Tucson

Tommy Orange

Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for There There

  • TOMMY ORANGE is the author of the 2018 New York Times bestselling novel There There, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Margaret Atwood praised it as “an astonishing literary debut,” and The New York Times described it as “a tense, prismatic book with inexorable momentum.” Orange’s follow-up, Wandering Stars, published in February, has been hailed by Time as one of the most anticipated books of 2024. Publishers Weekly has said, “With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters’ memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange’s essential place in the canon of Native American literature.” Born and raised in Oakland, California, where he lives today, Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

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.

Garrett Peck

Historian, author, and Willa Cather authority

  • GARRETT PECK is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, specializing in adventure travel and historic and cultural interpretation. The author of eight books about American history, Garrett’s latest is A Decade of Disruption: America in the New Millennium. He is currently working on a book about Willa Cather’s great classic Death Comes for the Archbishop, which will be published in 2025 by University of New Mexico Press. Peck will be leading the Festival’s Walk & Talk tour on Cather.

Douglas Preston

Bestselling journalist and co-author of the Pendergast 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 2017 nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and a Times 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 and is the co-editor, with Margaret Atwood, of the new collaborative novel Fourteen Days.

Roxana Robinson

Celebrated novelist, short story writer, and Georgia O’Keeffe biographer

  • ROXANA ROBINSON is the bestselling author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and in the new collaborative novel Fourteen Days. Robinson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and she was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library. Robinson has served on the boards of PEN and the Authors Guild and was the president of the Authors Guild. She has received the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers Award,” given by Poets and Writers, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community from the Authors Guild. She teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Marin Sardy

Acclaimed memoirist and essayist

  • MARIN SARDY is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Edge of Every Day (Pantheon, 2019). Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Guernica, The Paris Review, and other journals, as well as in two award-winning New Mexico–based photography books, Landscape Dreams and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby. Sardy’s work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three times listed as “notable” in the Best American series. She teaches memoir and personal essay writing for Authors Publish and Pace University.

Jenn Shapland

Prizewinning essayist and memoirist

  • JENN SHAPLAND is the author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of a 2021 Lambda Literary Award. Her most recent book, Thin Skin: Essays, was a Time, Publishers Weekly, and New York Public Library best book of 2023. Alexander Chee, the author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, calls it “a wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear power, healthcare, queerness and American life unlike any I can think of, in essays that give lessons in pushing this form to the limit. The resulting collection is iconoclastic, electric, illuminating … a book to keep for a long time.” Terry Tempest Williams has called it “an important and visionary book.” Shapland lives in Santa Fe, where she works as an archivist for a visual artist.

Hampton Sides

Bestselling master of narrative histories including  Blood and Thunder and In the Kingdom of Ice

  • HAMPTON SIDES is the author of the bestselling narrative histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post. His latest book is The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, to be published by Doubleday in April 2024. His journalism has been frequently anthologized, and he is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the PEN USA Award for Nonfiction. A past fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, Hampton is a board member of the Authors Guild and the Society of American Historians.

Tracy K. Smith

Former U.S. poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of To Free the Captives

  • Two-term U.S. poet laureate TRACY K. SMITH is a memoirist, translator, and opera librettist for the world premiere of The Righteous. She is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, including Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, as well as The Body’s Question, Duende, and Wade in the Water. Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her newest book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023), grapples with being Black, being an American, and what it means to be free. The opera The Righteous, a collaboration by Smith and composer Gregory Spears, will make its world premiere on July 13, 2024, at the Santa Fe Opera. Smith is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Arthur Sze

National Book Award–winning poet

  • ARTHUR SZE is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems; Sight Lines, which won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light, selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu; The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian-American Literary Award; and Archipelago, selected for an American Book Award. The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in May 2024. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Luci Tapahonso

Revered educator and inaugural poet laureate of the Diné Nation

  • LUCI TAPAHONSO is professor emerita of English Literature at the University of New Mexico and served as the inaugural poet laureate of the Diné Nation from 2013 to 2015. She is the author of six award-winning books of poetry and prose, including A Radiant Curve and Blue Horses Rush In, as well as three children’s books. She has also taught poetry writing and contemporary American and Navajo literature at the University of Kansas, the University of Arizona, Diné College, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her many honors include the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, Italy’s Ostana Prize, which honors authors who write in their mother tongue, and the Luci Tapahonso Distinguished Indigenous Speaker Series, established by the University of New Mexico. She has read everywhere from Harvard and Princeton to the University of New Zealand and the Tbilisi International Festival of Literature, in the Republic of Georgia.

John Vaillant

2023 National Book Award finalist in nonfiction for Fire Weather

  • JOHN VAILLANT is the author of the 2023 bestseller Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times. Fire Weather was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Vaillant’s other bestselling books include The Golden Spruce: A Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, which won several awards, including Canada’s Writers’ Trust and Governor General’s awards for nonfiction; The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, which has been published in sixteen languages; and the 2015 novel The Jaguar's Children, which was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Kirkus Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Vaillant contributes to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian and received the 2014 international Windham Campbell Prize in nonfiction for his “gripping narratives that combine science, geography, history and anthropology to convey his passionate commitment to preserving natural resources in an environmentally threatened world.” He lives with his family in Vancouver

Wang Jiaxin

Award-winning poet, translator, and educator

  • WANG JIAXIN is an eminent Chinese poet, essayist, and translator who has published more than forty books. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror, translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, who said the collection “belongs to this moment, and reading it, one is aware again that poetry is not a matter of movements and historical moments, but of individual voices, in this case stunningly alert and interior.” Wang’s poems have been published in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review, and he has been a poet in residence at the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He has won many domestic and international awards, including the inaugural Ai Qing Poetry Award. An esteemed translator of Yeats, Mandelstam, and especially Paul Celan, he has also translated books by American poets Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky. Wang was a professor at Renmin University of China for years and now splits his time between Beijing and New York.

Javier Zamora

Author of the extraordinary memoir Solito, a New York Times Notable Book

  • JAVIER ZAMORA is the author of the searing 2022 memoir Solito, which was a New York Times bestseller and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. He has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Zamora has also been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Macondo, and Yaddo. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of war and immigration on his family. Javier was born in El Salvador and lives in Tucson, Arizona.