“We want to bring in writers who can really speak thoughtfully and in inspiring ways about these challenging times for both the country and the world: how to view them, how to deal with them, how to live in them,” says Mark Bryant, co-founder of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival and its chief curator. Bryant is a journalist, editor, and publisher who’s worked with emerging and award-winning journalists and authors whose honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Book Prize.
“I continue to marvel every year at the feeling, the magic that seems to happen at the festival,” he says. “I’m a cynical journalist, and yet I’ve been touched by the ways in which the power of storytelling brings people together in community, bridging divides, and championing tolerance and compassion.”
The festival became a full 501c(3) nonprofit last year, has a new executive director (Megan Mulry), and is, as Bryant notes, “set up to be a sustainable project long into the future.”
The literary festival exemplifies how reading and writing can be acts of community as well as a source for inspiration and hope during social or political unrest.
And Bryant says the festival’s organizers are committed to making the events accessible to as many people as possible. They set aside 1,500 free tickets to sessions for New Mexico residents who are either students, teachers, librarians, or regular book fans for whom tickets may be financially out of reach.
The festival also expanded to local and national organizations and initiatives through its Young Writers and Readers program by partnering with the Santa Fe Public Library, schools, and nonprofits like Narrative 4 — co-founded by award-winning author Colum McCann — and the School for Advanced Research. Also joining the event this year is Albuquerque’s Bookworks bookstore, which will have books for sale at the festival and will host signings.
Overwhelmed by the panels and events? Following is a guide to the authors and topics of interest, as well as other major events.
If you’re interested in …
… talking about race:
» Percival Everett (in conversation with Cord Jefferson)
Everett confirmed during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers last November that no one cares less about awards than Everett himself — even if the award in question is the National Book Award, which Everett won for his latest novel, James (2024), or the Booker Prize for which it was shortlisted. The novel, which also was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 5, retells Huckleberry Finn’s adventures from the point of view of the enslaved Jim.
Everett opens the festival on the main stage with a conversation with TV writer Cord Jefferson, who wrote and directed American Fiction (2023), which won Jefferson the 2024 Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) and was nominated for Best Picture.
» Danzy Senna (in conversation with JJ Amaworo Wilson)
Senna is a novelist and essayist with several books under the belt and a new novel, Colored Television, due out in July. Her father is Black from a humble background and her mother is white with a blue-blood Bostonian Irish and English heritage, and Senna focuses her writing around race, class, and gender.
Senna will talk with Anglo-American-Nigerian author, playwright, and educator JJ Amaworo Wilson, who lives in Silver City and is the current writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University, is the editorial director of Mimbres Press of WNMU, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine.
… immigration and identity:
» Viet Thanh Nguyen (in conversation with Julia Goldberg)
Speaking of book awards, Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (2015) won many, including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Nguyen followed it with The Committed (2021), a second novel in Nguyen’s trilogy about an unnamed protagonist, sometimes known as Captain, a double agent who works for both the South Vietnamese Army and as a spy for the North Vietnamese and who moves to America and later to Paris. Nguyen grew up as a child refugee and is also now a professor of American literature and ethnicity. He has a new book of essays out, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.
He will be in conversation on the main stage with Julia Goldberg, a Santa Fe-based journalist, author, and editor, and currently the editor-in-chief of Source New Mexico.
» Marie Arana (in conversation with Maria Hinojosa)
By 2050, according to Statista, around 94.4 million people in the U.S. will be of Hispanic or Latino heritage. In her latest book, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority (2024), Arana, a journalist, author, editor, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress — and a Latina herself — explores the Latinx experience and its diverse and complex cultural and political beliefs and views.
Arana will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Maria Hinojosa, a Mexican-American journalist, author, and anchor and executive producer of Latino USA.
» Amy Tan (in conversation with Kathleen McCleery)
The novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), Tan’s debut, was just a prelude to the then-emerging author’s writing career. She has written 10 books since, many of them depicting the Chinese diaspora in America. Her newest book is the beautifully illustrated (by the author) The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024), which details Tan’s observation of birds in her backyard in the face of growing racism against Asians in the U.S. Tan received many awards and honors for her literary work, including the National Humanities Medal.
She will be in conversation with Kathleen McCleery, special correspondent and freelance producer for PBS NewsHour based in New Mexico. She has covered presidential elections since 1980 and taught journalism at Princeton University.
… politics:
» Heather Cox Richardson (in conversation with Kathleen McCleery)
You may know Richardson from her daily installments of Letters from an American or from her podcast of the same title and content. Or you may know her from her many history books, including Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023).
Richardson, an award-winning author and American history professor at Boston College (with three degrees from Harvard), lives in a small town in Maine, and is married to a lobsterer — and is our very own Publius Cornelius Tacitus.
… environment and activism:
» Terry Tempest Williams (in conversation with William deBuys)
If you need a dose of quotable prose to get you through these difficult times, get Williams’ Erosion (2016) — or any of her many other books, for that matter. Williams is an activist, conservationist, award-winning writer, educator, and writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She lives in her native Utah and focuses her work on social and environmental justice, tackling topics like nuclear testing and uranium mining, water rights, public lands and wilderness, and women’s health.
Williams will chat with William deBuys, New Mexican author, activist, influential thinker of the American West, Guggenheim fellow, a Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, who chaired the Valles Caldera Trust to help manage the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve.
» Michael Pollan (in conversation with Terry Tempest Williams)
Pollan is a journalist, former editor-in-chief at Harper’s Magazine, and current teacher of nonfiction at Harvard, science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley, and a course on Master Class. He writes about ethical, sustainable, intentional, and healthy eating and opposes industrial monoculture. His latest book is titled This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021) and challenges our views of psychoactive plants.
… fiction that keeps you on your toes:
» Ramona Emerson (in conversation with Jamie Figueroa)
Emerson (Diné) worked for 16 years as a photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department before turning to fiction writing. She is an award-winning novelist whose first novel, Shutter (2022), was long-listed for the National Book Award and follows Rita Todacheene, a Navajo forensic photographer for the APD who sees the ghosts of crime victims. Exposure, the sequel to Shutter, came out last September.
Emerson will discuss craft and the writing life with Jamie Figueroa, a New Mexico-based Boricura (Afro-Taíno) and author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (2021) and Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico (2024).
» Colum McCann (in conversation with Alex Parsons)
McCann is an award-winning Irish writer who lives in New York City. His work has earned him the International Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Award, and a nomination for an Academy Award for a short film for which he wrote the script. His latest Novel, Twist (2025), tells the story of an Irish journalist and playwright who’s asked to cover the underwater cables that carry all the information on the internet. McCann is the co-founder of Narrative 4 (N4), an organization that helps youth develop empathy for others and better their communities through the story exchange model.
McCann will chat with Alex Parsons, a novelist and associate professor of creative writing at the University of Houston. He has received several awards and honors for his work and favors discussions of craft and technique in his various courses and workshops.
» Gabrielle Zevin (in conversation with Hakim Bellamy)
Zevin is a cultural icon with several award-winning bestsellers to her credit, including her latest immersive novel for adults, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022), that follows the relationship between two friends who are building a video game together. The story grabs even those readers who’ve never been into gaming.
Zevin will speak with poet Hakim Bellamy, the inaugural Albuquerque Poet Laureate, a national and regional Poetry Slam Champion, a former Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, a former deputy director for the City of Albuquerque Department of Arts & Culture department, and a New Mexico legislative analyst. If that isn’t enough, as of May 17, Bellamy will also be a graduate of the school of law at the University of New Mexico.
» Miranda July (in conversation with Caity Weaver)
If you’ve seen July’s name everywhere recently, you’re not hallucinating: her latest novel, All Fours (2024), was a finalist for the National Book Award and a racy one at that, as it speaks of the sexual obsessions and adventures of a middle-aged and menopausal woman. July can do pretty much anything, from winning a Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Festival for one of her feature films (Me and You and Everyone We Know) to writing bestselling novels and short stories.
July will talk to Caity Weaver, a recent transplant to Santa Fe from the East Coast, a former staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and GQ, and currently a staff writer at The Atlantic.
» Cristina Rivera Garza (in conversation with Maria Hinojosa)
Rivera Garza is known as one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary writers, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2021), in which she discusses her sister’s murder two decades prior. The book was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Her novel The Taiga Syndrome won the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award. Rivera Garza is currently a MacArthur Fellow. Her latest novel, Death Takes Me, came out in February.
… cultural preservation:
» Chris Rainier
Photographer Rainier was Ansel Adams’ last studio assistant in the early 1980s. He was a National Geographic Society Fellow and is a Royal Geographic Society Fellow. His photographic work is an act of activism meant to help preserve and archive traditional cultures and languages on the verge. He is the author of several books of photographic storytelling, and the co-founder of the Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation.
… life stories:
» Deborah Jackson Taffa (in conversation with Hampton Sides)
Taffa (Quechan [Yuma]/Laguna Pueblo) is the director of the creative writing MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and author of several books, including her memoir Whiskey Tender, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award.
She will chat with Hampton Sides, Santa Fe-based bestselling writer and historian and author of several historical nonfiction books such as Wide Wide Sea (2024), Blood and Thunder (2006), and Ghost Soldiers (2001).
» Jonathan Eig
Eig is a biographer whose latest book on Martin Luther King Jr., King: A Life (2024), was a finalist for the National Book Award and won Eig the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. He’s written the biographies on Al Capone, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Lou Gehrig. Ali: A Life (2017) won a PEN American Literary Award and inspired a documentary by Ken Burns about the champion.
… all things poetry:
Both poetry sessions are free and open to the public.
The festival has two poetry sessions on May 18: a morning session during which Dana Levin, Victoria Chang, and Santa Fe Poet Laureate Tommy Archuleta will read from their work; and an afternoon session, during which Elizabeth Jacobson, the former Poet Laureate of Santa Fe (2019-2021) will introduce the panel of the three poets, who will discuss poetic craft and answer audience questions.
… meditation:
» Roshi Joan Halifax/Henry Shukman
Join writer, social activist, and Buddhist teacher Halifax on May 17 and poet, author, and Zen master Shukman on May 18 for a morning meditation session and conversation about the writing life and literature.
Halifax is the founder and head teacher at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe and the author of several books, including Standing at the Edge (2018) and Being with Dying (1997).
Shukman is the author of a memoir titled One Blade of Grass (2019) and of Original Love (2024). He grew up in Oxford, U.K., and studied at Cambridge University. He is the co-founder of The Way, a meditation App, and has taught Zen meditation for several organizations and institutions. ◀
