Santa Fe Literary Festival official magazine

Margaret Atwood • George RR Martin • John Grisham • N Scott Momaday

Colson Whitehead

“St. John’s College is a literary salon.”

— FRANK BRUNI, THE NEW YORK TIMES

ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE IS AMERICA’S GREAT

three millennia of literature: thinkers who

Through these thinkers, we observe our

BOOKS COLLEGE. A literary education at

are, themselves, having a conversation with

own ideas rise and fall. The great books

St. John’s is like no other in America. Rather

one another. This means that we go to the

gift us the distance of time, through which

than looking forward, we go back to the

source texts rather than to the critics who

we learn to see ourselves, our world, and

thinkers who led us to where we are today.

interpret the source. Through this pro-

each other with clarity and wisdom.

Here, students engage in unmediated con-

cess, we see great theories rise, battle, and

This is just a small taste of St. John’s College.

versation with great minds from across

fall—and influence the next great thinker.

This is education at its most literary.

B.A., Liberal Arts M.A., Liberal Arts M.A., Eastern Classics

SJC.EDU

“The most rigorous college in America” —FORBES

WHY IS ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE RENOWNED FOR OUR RIGOR? Because we explore

John’s understanding how our modern

and political discord over the course

world came to be. How democracy and

of millennia—and how we might man-

3,000 years of the most world-changing

capitalism were formed, and what was left

age it more wisely moving forward.

texts, which span seven academic disci-

behind. Where music, astronomy, algebra,

This is just a small taste of St. John’s College.

plines. We do this in four short years—or

and quantum mechanics came from, and

This is education at its most rigorous.

two years in our Graduate Institute—and

how they are connected. How human-

in sequence. As a result, students leave St.

ity has dealt with war, technology, plague,

B.A., Liberal Arts M.A., Liberal Arts M.A., Eastern Classics

SJC.EDU

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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IMMERSION . INSPIRATION . WIDE OPEN SPACE

Photo by Jim Spickard

This iconic landscape continues to awaken the creative and wellness spirit in all of us.

Join in a weeklong adventure. Whether you are writing, painting or just soothing the soul, the wide open space of Ghost Ranch awaits.

Literally Letters Calligraphy Festival June 5-11 Calligraphy, Painting, Writing & Photography

Writing About Thin Places, Sacred Places (Carol Lea Clark)

Family Week

July 3-8 4th of July celebration (5 nights)

July Family Friendly Weeks

Adults join in AM workshops and youth to age 18 join in summer adventure with afternoon and evening time to build memories.

July 10-16; 17-23; 24-29 Family Friendly Weeks Adults join in AM workshops and youth to age 18 join in summer adventure with afternoon and evening time to build memories.

October 8-14 Fall Writing Festival

Maps, Journeys and Geographies (Anita Skeen and Colleen Anderson) The Art of Aging: Contending w/ Time in the Personal Essay (Marcia Aldrich) Saints & Aints (Jean Hathaway) Writing the 10-Minute Play (Kate Snodgrass) Practically Painting with O’Keeffe (Anna Koster) Silversmithing: Your Mementos (Jamie Halpern) Fire it Up! Art Welding (Tom Nichols and David Kadlec) Fall Colors and More: Photographing the Change (John Hayden and Kent Bowser)

October 16-23 Fall Writing Festival My Letter to the World: The Art of the Letter and the Letter Poem (Anita Skeen) Beauty in Brevity: the Art of the Short Essay (Colleen Anderson) Celebrate Women: Flourishing as We Age at Casa del sol (Susan Weber) We Live Storied Lives: Every Story Matters (Keith Herron) Pottery: Hi-Fire Glazes (Barbara Campbell) Fused Glass Vessels (Katrina Jameson)

GHOSTRANCH.ORG/SFNML

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

505.685.1000

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The Santa Fe Literary Festival Thanks Its 2022 Partners and Donors.

Your support means the world to us. Thank you to the sponsors, volunteers, and donors who are making this festival possible.

DONORS ____________________ Literary Angels

Jane McConnell and TJ Heyman Community Foundation Boulder County Edward and Maria Gale Gale Family Foundation

Partners’ Circle Anonymous Rebecca Duncan Juliet Erickson Douglas Preston

Festival Patrons Polly Ahrendts Lamar Fletcher Tareef Shawa Nancy M. Wirth

Festival Friends

JoAnn Balzer Patricia and Bob Curtis Kirk and Sheila Ellis David and Edelma Huntley Joanna Hurley Myla Lerner and Larry Kramer Eric Lewis Amy McCombs James and Patty McGrath Morris Morris Family Giving Fund Rio Chama Book Club

Festival Donors Jane Alexander Susan Nall Bales Cathy Campbell Vicki Clifford Mare Vernon

SPONSORS ____________________ Festival Supporters

Pamela Abernathy Biff Barnard Lucie Duranceau Church Michaela Lawrence Marilyn Macbeth Aaron Payne Pam Pierce Lucy Pierpont In memory of Anne Haire Platt Mary Saul David Skolkin Jo Ann Ward Polly Wotherspoon Cheryl Young

Festival Members

Martha Abeyta Donna Berg Irene Bookman Sally Denton Linda W. Dillman Melissa Eason Paula Hertel Laura Hohnhold Brenda Jerome Bruce and Mary Anne Larsen Barbara Lenssen and Keith Anderson Dieter Mueller Barbara and Michael Ogg Linda O’Leary Roman Ramsey Aliceson Robinson Tori Warner Shepard David Skolkin Ginny White

Additional Supporters Dianna Delling Anna Sochocky

Hospitality Partners

86 2022 2022 Santa Fe Fe Literary LiteraryFestival Festival

Around the Table Sponsor

TABLE Magazine New Mexico

Festival Foundation Sponsors

Santa Fe Community Foundation Vanna M. Lorie Memorial Book Fund

Friend of the Santa Fe Literary Festival New Mexico Gas Company

Inaugural Business Supporters

Bode’s General Store Dell Fox Jewelry Santa Fe Coins and Jewelry Teresa Robinson and Eric Midling of Living Threads Studio

HOSPITALITY PARTNERS ____________________ Properties graciously hosting our authors: Bishop’s Lodge Drury Plaza Hotel Eldorado Hotel and Spa El Rey Court Hotel Santa Fe Hotel St. Francis Hotel Chimayo Inn and Spa at Loretto Inn of the Anasazi Inn on the Alameda La Fonda on the Plaza Las Palomas The Hilton Santa Fe Properties providing room blocks for Festivalgoers: Drury Plaza Hotel Eldorado Hotel & Spa El Rey Court Hotel Santa Fe La Fonda on the Plaza The Hilton Santa Fe

Photo: Jack Parsons

VOLUNTEERS ____________________ Polly Ahrendts Liz Axelrod Nancy Benkof Paloma Bryant Emily Budziak Steve Cantrell Yolanda Eisenstein Juliet Erickson Judith Espinar Louise Ann Fernandez Dell Fox Mara Harris Paula Hertel Elizabeth Hightower Laura Hohnhold Adelma Hnasko Joanna Hurley Ian Johnson Annette Kelly Clari Leonard Lisa Leonard Valerie Levine Mary Madigan Nancy McCabe James McGrath Morris Linda Milanesi Carmella Padilla Will Palmer Joni Parman Lucy Pierpont Johnnie Prather Teresa Robinson Marin Sardy Jane Shreffler Hampton and Anne Sides Marsie Silvestro Cyndy Tanner Scott Vermiere Annie Vought Kim Weiss Ahdina Zunkel

Let literature lift you. let literature lift you Story Ladder Volunteers Emma Barnal Jesse Begay Skye Bowdon Scarlet Burke Serenity Castor Olive Clay Ava du Coudray Isa Mays Dominguez Tienzin Furgason-Ho Nevaeh Galaviz Marco Gallegos Venia Kelly Oz Leshem Abdiel Lopez Madeleine Lopez Shayla Lovett Roan Lucero P.J. Lythe Crow Miller Milo Mora Charlee Ossola Alejandro Partido Sarah Peralta Allie Poague Aidenn Daniel Pollon Adrian Roybal-Ashton Wybie Ruiz Jocelyn Shroulote Violet Smith

LOCAL BUSINESS SUPPORT ____________________ Adobo Catering Janet Bailey and Don Barliant of Barbara’s Books Beastly Books Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse DMC New Mexico Gabriella Marks Photography Gruet Winery Jean Cocteau Cinema Kelly’s Liquor Living Threads Studio Los Poblanos Paper Tiger Parasol Productions Santa Fe School of Cooking Santa Fe Sports and Images Sazón Seret and Sons Sky Railway

NONPROFIT SUPPORT ____________________ Fractured Atlas New Mexico Writers The Authors Guild Santa Fe Public Library The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market The School for Advanced Research The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry

A big thank-you to Santa Fe Tourism and their team, and to Jack Parsons for the use of his beautiful photography.

Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the growing list of believers who’ve graciously given their time, effort, donations, and support. Please see our website for a full listing of SFLF volunteers.

MEDIA SPONSORS ____________________ New Mexico Magazine Santa Fe Magazine TABLE Magazine New Mexico The Independent The Santa Fe New Mexican Wildsam Field Guides

Sponsors

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¡Bienvenidos!

Welcome to the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival

ENJOY THE BEAUTY AND DELICIOUSNESS DELIVERED QUARTERLY TO YOUR HOME AND WEEKLY TO YOUR INBOX.

S

anta Fe is a visual arts city. Santa Fe is a performing arts city. Santa Fe is a market city. These are all true, and more, but Santa Fe is also a literary city — a city that writes books, reads books and loves books. In fact, it’s a city that for centuries has revered storytelling in all its

forms, from the Native and Hispano peoples whose oral traditions rooted them in the landscapes to a long line of writers whose work has imagined and illuminated the American West and the wider world.

The idea of hosting a literary festival that celebrates our extraordinary culture has been a gleam in the city’s eye for a long time, and we’re both thrilled and humbled to be able to bring it to life.

In the midst of such troubled, divided times, our maverick, multicultural city struck us as an ideal place for

From left to right: Clare Hertel, Julia Platt Leonard Photo Gabriella Marks

storytellers and thinkers to come together and

lift the human spirit through our shared love of language and ideas — and hope. After two long pandemic years, we’re thrilled to bring people together to share stories that transport them across cultures, borders and worlds.

As with all things Santa Fe, it takes many of us to make great things happen. We are eternally grateful to all the authors, partners, supporters, advisers and volunteers who helped make this event possible. Please do thank and support them. Together we will continue to make dreams happen in Santa Fe and beyond.

SUBSCRIBE AT

TABLEMAGAZINE.COM

With gratitude to all who have helped make SFLF possible!

Clare Hertel and Julia Platt Leonard Co-founders

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

Elizabeth Abeyta, 1955–2006 (Navajo) Untitled (Koshari), c. 1998 Clay, paint, leather, wool, feathers, coral, heishi, horsehair Photography by Addison Doty

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

PU B L I S H ED M AY 1 5, 2022

OWNER Robin Martin

May 20-23, 2022

PUBLISHER Tom Cross EDITOR Phill Casaus E DITOR IA L creative & editorial director Deborah Villa magazine editor Patricia West-Barker

What’s inside

copy editor Peg Goldstein ADVERTISING retail advertising director Wendy Ortega classified advertising manager Laura Harding ADVERTISING SALES Clara Holiday Deb Meyers Trina Thomas Lisa Vakharia ADVERTISING ART DEPARTMENT

10 Welcome 14 An Embarrassment of Riches 16 Schedule of Events 22 Who’s Who, Who’s Here

designers Elspeth Hilbert, Rick Artiaga, Justin Bixler PRODUCTION operations director Tim Cramer prepress manager Dan Gomez press coordinator Jorge Gamboa packaging coordinator Brenda Shaffer DISTRIBUTION circulation director Michael Reichard TECHNOLOGY technology director Michael Campbell WEB digital enterprise director Henry Lopez www.santafenewmexican.com ADDRESS office: 150 Washington Ave., Suite 205, Santa Fe hours: 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday advertising information: 505-995-3852 delivery: 505-986-3010, 800-873-3372 for copies of this magazine, call 505-986-3010 or email circulation@sfnewmexican.com

29 Profile: Margaret Atwood 32 On the Cover 34 Reading and Writing Early New Mexico 39 The Madeline Moment 42 Event Locator Map 44 The Power of Words 46 Bookstores and Libraries 49 Story Ladder

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AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES Inaugural literary festival brings locally, nationally and internationally acclaimed writers to Santa Fe Community Convention Center

BY STEPHANIE NAKHLEH Santa Fe is internationally known for the summer markets that bring Spanish colonial, folk and Native American art and thousands of visitors to the city. But this year the City Different kicks off its cultural season with the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival, May 20-23. The schedule is packed with dozens of events, from large gatherings with literary giants like Colson Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, Joy Harjo, Sandra Cisneros and George R.R. Martin to more intimate conversations between notable authors.

The festival was organized by two women with long experience in writing, publishing and book promotion: Julia Platt Leonard, a food writer with literary festival experience, and publicist Clare Hertel, a longtime Santa Fe resident.

“We’ve been talking about this for several years,” said Hertel. “We asked ourselves why, in a town with so many wonderful literary events, we hadn’t had a multiday festival that brought together national and international authors as well as many of our finest local writers. Finally, in 2019 we said, ‘Let’s do this.’ We wanted to launch it last year, but of course COVID happened.”

Mark Bryant, the third member of the team and husband to Hertel, is an editor and publisher with deep connections to the literary world. He is the author curator for the festival and a force behind the powerhouse lineup. “I’ve been fortunate to work with several of these authors over the years,” he said. “Some are old friends and colleagues. Others are simply people we’ve admired for their work and their character, and we think the world needs to know them. Some were already aware that New Mexico has been home for countless generations of artists and storytellers, beginning with the oral traditions of Native and Hispano peoples.

All of them understand, after two long pandemic years, how important it is for people to come together and share stories that transport them across cultures, borders and worlds beyond their own. That’s what we — the authors, volunteer organizers and the many other folks in the community who’ve lent their time and expertise — are hoping to deliver.”

The three used their individual skills and connections to pull together a larger team of supporters, including area writers, cultural leaders, businesses and nonprofit organizations. “We’ve tapped this diverse group as an informal sounding board for our ideas, especially with regard to engaging the local community,” Hertel said.

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

Locating the festival in Santa Fe wasn’t just a matter of convenience for organizers who happen to live here. “We have other markets for the major arts here, like the International Folk Art Market, Spanish Market and Indian Market — but nothing big and national for the literary arts,” said Hertel. “That’s why we wanted it here. Santa Fe has such a rich storytelling history, and it’s a beautiful place to bring writers and readers together.”

The lineup of participating writers includes some of the biggest names in publishing. In addition to Whitehead, Atwood, Harjo, Cisneros and Martin, featured speakers include John Grisham, Don Winslow, Lawrence Wright and Jon Krakauer. These bestselling and prizewinning authors discuss their work with each other and with audiences during readings and book signings that span the long weekend. Topics range from politics to race, immigration to the environment.

Genres include novels, narrative nonfiction, poetry, history, mystery, memoir and science fiction. “We considered the idea of focusing on one large topic and hanging everything around that, but it felt too narrow,” said Hertel. “This is a celebration of literature and ideas, and we felt that having a broad range of subjects and genres would be the best way to go for this first year, especially for the purposes of a long weekend. There’s hopefully something for everybody.”

Food for body and mind Santa Fe may be as well known for its food as for its art, and the culinary arts are a central theme of the festival. World-renowned chefs, cookbook authors and food writers talk about their work at programmed meals and events. “We’re living in an age when you can find a recipe online for almost anything in seconds,” said Leonard. “But great food writing is more than recipes — it’s about telling a story or sharing a memory. It’s about capturing your imagination and making you hungry at the same time. And ultimately, great food writing is great writing.”

Participating food-world stars include Freddie Bitsoie, award-winning Navajo chef and author of New Native Kitchen; Asma Khan, author of Asma’s Indian Kitchen and the chef/owner of Darjeeling Express in London; Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, owners of the London restaurant Honey & Co.; and Bryant Terry, a James Beard Award-winning vegan chef, food justice advocate and author of Afro-Vegan and Vegetable Kingdom.

The festival kicks off Friday evening, May 20, with Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award.

“Our goal was to find incredible chefs and cooks who can weave a tale, take us into their world and leave us inspired inside the kitchen and out,” said Leonard.

“I can’t think of five people working in cooking and food writing today who fit the bill more than these. Each one has a great story to tell, and we can’t wait for them to share it at the inaugural festival.”

Local culinary luminaries Cheryl Alters Jamison, four-time James Beard Cookbook Award winner with her late husband, Bill Jamison, and Deborah Madison, author of 14 cookbooks and the founding chef of Greens restaurant in San Francisco, are also on the program. Jamison leads an afternoon walk-andtalk to the Santa Fe School of Cooking on Sunday and a New Mexico-focused cooking and food writing workshop on Monday. Madison takes on a three-session sustainability and food study day at Albuquerque’s Los Poblanos on Monday.

Other food-related events include ticketed sit-down lunches on Saturday with Terry and on Sunday with Bitsoie; afternoon tea with Packer and Srulovich on Saturday and with Khan on Sunday; and tequila tastings at Sazón with chef Fernando Olea and The Great Margarita Book author Al Lucero. There are a limited number of tickets available for afternoon tea. Currently, lunch and tequila are offered only to VIP all-access pass holders; space may open for others to join the events for a fee at a later date. Box lunches are available to all and may be reserved through the online ticketing system.

The program, in brief The festival kicks off Friday evening, May 20, with Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award.

Weekend mornings begin with meditation, led by author and teacher Henry Shukman of Mountain Cloud Zen Center on Saturday and by activist, author and Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax of Upaya Zen Center on Sunday. After meditation on Saturday morning, Margaret Atwood takes the stage at 9:15 a.m., followed by crime and mystery writer Don Winslow at 11 a.m. On Sunday, Lawrence Wright talks at 9:15 a.m., followed by George R.R. Martin at 11 a.m.

Afternoons offer two different sessions with three choices each, Hertel said.

“First we’ll have one of our sit-down lecture events. Second we have these small walk-and-talks, just two each afternoon with a 15-person limit — first come, first to buy tickets online, first serve.” Saturday afternoon speakers include Phil Klay, Ashley C. Ford, Emily St. John Mandel and William deBuys. Sunday features Valeria Luiselli, Jon Krakauer and three dual events: Douglas Preston with Hampton Sides, Anne Hillerman and James McGrath Morris paying tribute to Tony HIllerman and N. Scott Momaday with Kirstin Valdez Quade, moderated by Carmella Padilla. Native writer Rebecca Roanhorse leads a panel on speculative fiction. Each night features a keynote in the convention center’s Sweeney Ballroom. “On Saturday it’s John Grisham with Hampton Sides as the moderator,” said Hertel. “On Sunday Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros will be sharing thoughts on their work, the state of the world and their friendship of

nearly 50 years.”

She continues, “We’re also introducing a program called Story Ladder, a pilot program that will extend beyond the festival, partnering with local schools and nonprofit organizations to help Santa Fe’s young people tell their stories.

As part of that, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a festival partner, is working with us to organize a youth poetry slam on the community stage [in the convention center courtyard].”

Monday, May 23, the last day of the festival, is set aside for free community events, including an appearance by Sandra Cisneros at the Southside Santa Fe Public Library, as well as a series of paid literary day trips. These full- and half-day excursions, still in the planning stages at the time of publication, will give festivalgoers the chance to extend their stay, join an author knowledgeable about the area and the issue, and experience Northern New Mexico’s culture and landscapes.

Offering such a mix of events over one long weekend is an experiment, Hertel said. “We’ll learn a lot this first year. We’re excited to see how it all rolls out.”

Launching the inaugural festival with a roster of heavy hitters has been a boon, Bryant said. “The collection of authors came together much more smoothly than we might have expected for a first-year effort. The mix of authors — national, international and closer to home — should give readers plenty to choose from, and their work covers a range of genres. Some of the writers are world famous and some are on their way. All of them are important voices in the world, especially in this time of so much turmoil and division. The festival’s goal over the next few years is to bring to Santa Fe an increasingly diverse, robust gathering of storytelling, ideas and points of view. We see this first event as just the start.”

If you go Inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival May 20-23 Santa Fe Community Convention Center 201 Marcy St., 505-474-6783, sfliteraryfestival.org See the festival website, sfliteraryfestival.org, for more information, including a list of walk-and-talks, literary day trips and additional programs. Many free events — including book signings and poetry readings — take place on Monday, May 23. The festival website offers a complete list.

Tickets to all events may be purchased via the website. Prices for individual author events range from $15 for students and $25 for New Mexico residents to $75 for nonresidents. A limited number of tickets for the afternoon tea events, which include nibbles and a book, are priced at $150 for nonresidents and $125 for New Mexico residents. Boxed lunches are $27.50. Tequila tastings are open only to all-access pass holders. Prices for literary day trips range from $125 to $650. There are also a number of free community literary events around town. For those who want it all, the $1,700 allaccess weekend pass gets the ticket bearer into all events.

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Santa Fe Literary Festival Event Schedule May 20–23, 2022

Books by festival authors are available to buy with your ticket purchase, and can be picked up at the festival.

Friday, May 20, 2022 5:00–6:00 p.m.

Opening reception

6:00–7:15 p.m.

On Stage with Colson Whitehead

Meet the authors. All ticket holders are welcome!

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, author of Harlem Shuffle, The Nickel Boys, and The Underground Railroad.

Saturday, May 21, 2022 8:00–9:00 a.m.

9:15–10:30 a.m.

Morning Meditation and Author Talk with Henry Shukman

With poet, author, and Zen master Henry Shukman.

On Stage with Margaret Atwood

The legendary Booker Prize–winning master of speculative fiction, poetry, essays, power feminism, and more.

11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.

On Stage with Don Winslow

12:30–2:00 p.m.

Around the Table with Bryant Terry

Please select one event for this time slot 2:00–3:00 p.m.

Please select one event for this time slot

Crime and mystery writer Don Winslow, bestselling author of City on Fire, The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border, and Savages.

Lunch with chef, educator, and author Bryant Terry, winner of the James Beard Award and the NAACP Image Award, who will discuss his writing and his work on food justice.

Author Talk with Phil Klay

Free Community Stage in the Courtyard Youth poetry slam—and much more!

Open to the public. Box lunches available when you buy tickets.

National Book Award winner Phil Klay, author of the celebrated short story collection Redeployment, the novel Missionaries, and the new essay collection Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. In conversation with fellow National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis.

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Saturday, May 21, 2022 2:00–3:00 p.m.

Please select one event for this time slot

3:30–4:30 p.m.

Please select one event for this time slot

4:45–5:45 p.m.

Please select one event for this time slot

Author Talk with Ashley C. Ford

Ashley C. Ford, author of the 2021 New York Times bestselling memoir Somebody’s Daughter and co-host of the HBO podcast Lovecraft Country Radio.

Author Talk: Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel, award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility, her new novel about love and art across centuries and the galaxy.

Around the Table: Honey & Co

Afternoon Tea with Honey & Co. Join Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, authors of four award-winning cookbooks and chef-owners of three London restaurants, including the hugely popular Honey & Co., for an afternoon tea inspired by the flavors of the Middle East.

5:30–6:30 p.m.

Cocktail Reception

6:30–7:45 p.m.

On Stage with John Grisham

Walk and Talk: Gustave Baumann Studio

A visit to the Gustave Baumann Studio. Join us for this intimate opportunity to both stretch your legs and enjoy a rare visit to artist Gustave Baumann’s studio. The acclaimed painter and printmaker was one of America’s finest creators of color woodcuts and an important part of Santa Fe’s history. Author Carmella Padilla and New Mexico History Museum curator Tom Leech will discuss Baumann’s life and work.

Panel Discussion: Where Do We Go from Here?

A discussion with revered author and conservationist William deBuys and Roshi Joan Halifax, social activist and Buddhist teacher, on moving forward in a time of global crisis.

Moderated by Louise Boyle, international correspondent for The Independent.

Around the Table: Tequila Tasting at Sazón

The celebrated restaurant and bar Sazón has one of the largest tequila and mezcal selections in the country, and Chef Fernando Olea will treat us to some of his favorites.

Please join us for a cash bar cocktail reception before our evening event.

Global bestselling author John Grisham, master of the legal thriller, in conversation with friend and fellow New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides.

Photo: Jack Parsons

Celebrate the power of story.

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Sunday, May 22, 2022 8:00–9:00 a.m.

9:15–10:30 a.m.

Morning Meditation and Author Talk with Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D.

Morning meditation and author talk with Roshi Joan Halifax, activist, author, and renowned Buddhist teacher (50-person limit).

On Stage with Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Plague Year, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, The Terror Years, and the novel The End of October.

11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.

On Stage with George R.R. Martin

12:30–2:00 p.m.

Around the Table: Freddie Bitsoie

Please select one event for this time slot 2:00–3:00 p.m.

Please select one event for this time slot

3:30–4:30 p.m.

Please select one event for this time slo

4:45–5:45 p.m.

George R.R. Martin—novelist, screenwriter, producer, and author of the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into the HBO series Game of Thrones—in conversation with friend and bestselling author Douglas Preston.

Lunch with award-winning Navajo chef Freddie Bitsoie, who will discuss his innovative take on Indigenous cuisine and his work as a Native foods educator.

Free Community Stage in the Courtyard

A youth poetry slam—and more! Open to the public. Box lunches available for purchase when you buy tickets

Wild Stories: On Stage with Douglas Preston and Hampton Sides

In Conversation: Valeria Luiselli

Walk and Talk: Literary Pilgrims

Special Tribute: Tony Hillerman

In Conversation: N. Scott Momaday and Kirstin Valdez Quade

Walk and Talk: The History of Chile in New Mexico

Around the Table: Tequila Tasting at Sazón

Around the Table with Asma Khan

A spirited and frank conversation with bestselling authors Douglas Preston and Hampton Sides on the pleasures and perils of writing, how Santa Fe has influenced their work, and how Hollywood has, for better or worse, adapted their books for film and television. Hosted by PBS NewsHour special correspondent Kathleen McCleery.

We honor a legendary New Mexico author. Bestselling novelist Anne Hillerman will discuss the life and legacy of her father with biographer James McGrath Morris and Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire mystery series.

On Stage with Jon Krakauer

Valeria Luiselli, immigration and extraordinary criminal justice activist and prizewinning author of the novel Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.

N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of House Made of Dawn, and Kirstin Valdez Quade, award-winning author of The Five Wounds and Night of the Fiestas, in conversation with author Carmella Padilla about their New Mexico–based works that explore themes of love, place, and sacrifice.

Please select one event for this time slot

Investigative journalist and narrative nonfiction author Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Missoula) in conversation with longtime friend and editor Mark Bryant.

5:30–6:30 p.m.

Cocktail Reception

6:30–7:45 p.m.

A Long Friendship: On Stage with Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo

The celebrated restaurant and bar Sazón has one of the largest tequila and mezcal selections in the country, and Chef Fernando Olea will treat us to some of his favorites.

Author Lynn Cline introduces you to the literary luminaries of the Santa Fe writers’ colony, which flourished from 1917 to 1950 and helped set the stage for the city’s vibrant contemporary literary scene. Stroll through the historic heart of downtown Santa Fe and discover how northern New Mexico influenced American novelist Willa Cather, poet Witter Bynner, playwrights, and many others, and visit places where they gathered for extravagant parties and social events.

Stroll with us to the internationally acclaimed Santa Fe School of Cooking with James Beard Award– winning cookbook author Cheryl Alters Jamison.

We’ll snack on salsa and other southwestern treats while Jamison discusses the cultural significance and history of chile in New Mexico, which is known as the chile capital of the world.

Afternoon Tea with Asma Khan. Sip a cup of chai and savor an assortment of Indian-inspired treats with chef Asma Khan, cookbook author and owner of London’s famed Darjeeling Express restaurant.

Join us for a cash bar cocktail reception before our closing night’s event!

Bestselling author Sandra Cisneros and U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo met nearly 50 years ago at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These iconic authors will share stories of personal evolution, marvel at the shape their lives and work have taken, and offer reflections on the state of the world.

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Monday, May 23, 2022

Extend your experience with Literary Day Trips and Community Literary Events.

Santa Fe’s fabled blue skies and fresh air inspire festivalgoers to take a deeper dive into the city and Northern New Mexico environs. A series of full- and half-day excursions on Monday, May 23, give you the chance to extend your stay, join an author, and experience the area’s cultural treasures and spectacular landscapes.

Please visit our website for an up-to-date list of events, prices, and times for all Day Trips and Community Events.

Sustainability & Food Study at Los Poblanos Spend a day at Los Poblanos, a beautiful organic farm located in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, an hour south of Santa Fe. You’ll have the opportunity to engage with leading writers and thinkers working in sustainability, food, and agriculture. Sessions include: James Beard Award-winning author Deborah Madison in conversation with Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Defending Beef; chef and Native foods educator Freddie Bitsoie on the role chefs and the food industry can play in creating a more sustainable food system; and Los Poblanos’ director of horticulture, Wes Brittenham, on the challenges of sustainable farming in dry climates. The day will include a three-course lunch at Los Poblanos’ award-winning Campo restaurant, a farm tour, and a cocktail demonstration showing how Los Poblanos uses herbs and botanicals to create delicious drinks.

For a truly memorable getaway, extend your stay by booking a room or spa treatments at Los Poblanos.

Indigenous Voices and Perspectives at the School for Advanced Research’s Historic Campus Founded in 1907, the School for Advanced Research (SAR) is one of North America’s preeminent independent institutions for the study of anthropology, related social sciences, and humanities. During this day trip, you’ll hear from several important Native writers who, through their work, offer unique, varied, and important perspectives about our history, collective memories, and relationship to the land. You’ll also be treated to a private tour of the Indian Arts Research Center, home to one of the nation’s most important Southwest Native American art research collections, with more than 12,000 works that span from the sixth century to the present. The group will then enjoy a poetry reading by Max Early (Laguna Pueblo), who writes in both English and his native Keresan language. Afterward, attendees will join a panel discussion with a number of SAR’s former Indigenous Writers in Residence, followed by a catered lunch prepared with Ancestral ingredients and a contemporary flair. Finish the day with a self-guided tour of SAR’s historic campus.

Hungry for More: A Day of New Mexico Inspired Cooking and Writing How do you combine all of the ingredients that are needed for successful food writing? Find out on this literary day trip with James Beard Award-winning author Cheryl Alters Jamison at the internationally acclaimed Santa Fe School of Cooking. As she shares her expertise on how to make your food writing stand out, Jamison will prepare some classic New Mexican dishes such as those she pays tribute to in her book Tasting New Mexico: Recipes Celebrating One Hundred Years of Distinctive Home Cooking. You will also have the opportunity to put on an apron and join in tamale making. This excursion is equal parts cooking class and food-writing seminar, finished off with a full New Mexican lunch served with a flight of New Mexico wines!

Excursions, Adventures, Readings, and Signings Literary excursions and adventures with authors: Sky Railway: skyrailway.com

Guided Fly-Fishing with the Reel Life: thereellife.com/flyguide Walking Tours on Santa Fe’s Colorful and Complex History: sfliteraryfestival.org

Special author readings and signings at:

An Evening with the Poets Laureate presented by Poetry Downtown Beastly Books: beastlybooks.com

The International Folk Art Market: folkartmarket.org Living Threads: livingthreads.org

Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse: collectedworksbookstore.com For a complete list of community events, please see sflitearyfestival.org 2022 Santa LiteraryFestival Festival 19 5 2022 Santa Fe Fe Literary

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The Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library

is an independent non-profit organization. Its mission is to advocate for and to support the public library by providing funding for programming, services, and materials that enrich our diverse community.

Our Santa Fe Public Libraries are community information hubs where everyone can gather to learn, create, and dream. The Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library seek to preserve and enhance our libraries for generations today and tomorrow.

We hope you will join us by becoming a member of the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library, donating to support Library programs, participating in the events we sponsor, attending our book sales, and volunteering for the Friends.

Become a Friend today!

https://www.santafelibraryfriends.org/ 2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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WHO’S WHO...WHO’S HERE

LUIS MORA

MARK WOODWARD

KEITH DANNEMILLER

KYLE LANGAN

BEN MOSCONA

HEATHER STEN

Margaret Atwood

Freddie Bitsoie

Sandra Cisneros

Lynn Cline

William deBuys

Ashley Ford

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays and graphic novels.

Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published in November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series.

Her other works of fiction include Cat’s Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; the MaddAddam trilogy, and Hag-Seed. Among her other awards are the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award.

Freddie Bitsoie is a proud Navajo and an awardwinning chef. Most recently he was the executive chef of Mitsitam Native Foods Café, located inside Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. He is the winner of the Smithsonian’s Native Chef Competition and has contributed to a number of cookbooks, including America: The Cookbook (Phaidon, 2017) and James Beard Award–winner The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). His most recent cookbook is New Native Kitchen, co-written with James Beard Awardwinning author James O. Fraioli, in which he shares his culinary insights into Native American cooking and celebrates the rich Indigenous heritage of American cuisine.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist and visual artist whose work explores the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Her numerous awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Her classic novel The House on Mango Street has sold more than six million copies, and her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. Her latest book is Martita, I Remember You/ Martita, Te Recuerdo, a story in English and in Spanish (Vintage, September 2021).

Lynn Cline is the awardwinning author of Literary Pilgrims: The Santa Fe and Taos writers’ colonies (University of New Mexico Press); The Maverick Cookbook: Iconic Recipes and Tales from New Mexico (Leaf Storm Press); and Romantic Days and Nights in Santa Fe (Globe Pequot Press). She has presented numerous lectures about the Santa Fe and Taos writers’ colonies around the country, and her articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Sunset, Publisher’s Weekly, Ploughshares Literary Journal, New Mexico Magazine and Edible New Mexico. She hosts Cline’s Corner, a weekly talk show featuring authors, artists, curators, chefs and other personalities, on Santa Fe Public Radio’s KSFR 101.1 FM.

William deBuys is the author of ten books, including The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures (one of the Christian Science Monitor’s ten best nonfiction books of 2015) and A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. His River of Traps (with photographer Alex Harris) was a Pulitzer Prize nonfiction finalist in 1991. His most recent book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, appeared in August 2021. He has been a Kluge Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress (2018), a Guggenheim Fellow (20082009) and a Lyndhurst Fellow (1986-1988). He served as founding chair of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administered the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve (20012004). He lives on a farm in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Ashley C. Ford’s New York Times bestselling memoir Somebody’s Daughter was published by Flatiron Books in June 2021. It’s a brilliant story about reckoning with your past to take hold of your future — of finding love for those you have yet to forgive. Ford is the former host of the podcast The Chronicles of Now and the co-host of the HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio.

She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate Lab, Astro Renegade FordStacy. Ford has written or guest-edited for Elle, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Domino, Cup of Jo and various other web and print publications.

1960s

24 contemporary literary luminaries What they saw in New Mexico — and what I saw in them

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BY WOLF SCHNEIDER Peace. Love. Freedom. What a time it was. The modern era in literary New Mexico began in the sixties, as did so much else that was positive. When I first glimpsed New Mexico on-screen in Easy Rider, I was sold on the place. So was the flood of writers who would establish themselves here over the next five-plus decades. Here’s what some of the most notable have written about the state — among them, some of my all-time favorites.

Richard Bradford published the evocative Red Sky at

Morning in 1968. In it, the fictitious town of Sagrado subs for Santa Fe, depicted as a western hamlet that holds on to safety during World War II. “Sagrado protected itself, as it had for more than 300 years, by being nonessential.

That’s the best way to get through a war: don’t be big and strong, be hard to find,” was Bradford’s viewpoint. Harper Lee called the book “a minor marvel,” and it was adapted into a film.

His 1960 novel The Rounders and 1962 book The Hi-Lo Country (both made into movies) established Max Evans as a New Mexico cowboy writer, exceptionally well versed in the ins and outs of wranglin’ horses, patchin’ fences and how “a running walk will carry a cowboy a lot of miles

WHO’S WHO...WHO’S HERE

MICHAEL LIONSTAR

NOAH ROEN

MATIKA WILBER

KITTY LEAKEN

GABRIELLA MARKS

ADAM JAHEIL

John Grisham

Roshi Joan Halifax

Joy Harjo

Anne Hillerman

Cheryl Alters Jamison Craig Johnson

John Grisham was working as a lawyer in Mississippi when one day he overheard the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and decided to write a novel that explored what might have happened if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. That book, A Time to Kill, was published in 1989, and Grisham has since written more than thirty-five more novels, one work of nonfiction, a collection of stories and seven novels for young readers. His name has long been synonymous with the modern legal thriller, with three hundred million books in print and translations in forty languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films. His most recent novel is Sooley (Doubleday, 2021). Sparring Partners will publish in May 2022.

Roshi Joan Halifax is a Zen priest, social activist, 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 and Tribal Wisdom; A Buddhist Life in America: Simplicity in the Complex; Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness 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.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise; Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings; How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems; and She Had Some Horses.

She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing, including Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many awards include the Jackson Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Santa Fe author Anne Hillerman continues the Navajo detective stories her father, Tony Hillerman, made popular. Her debut mystery, Spider Woman’s Daughter, received the prestigious Spur Award from Western Writers of America as best first novel.

That book and the five novels that followed were all New York Times best sellers. Her sixth mystery, Stargazer, was released in 2021 and debuted at number seven on the New York Times bestseller list.

Before becoming a novelist, Hillerman was a nonfiction author and award-winning journalist. The next novel in the Leaphorn/Chee/ Manuelito saga, The Sacred Bridge, her seventh and the twenty-fifth in the series, will be released by HarperCollins in 2022.

Cheryl Jamison has earned four James Beard Foundation Book Awards, an International Association of Culinary Professionals Award, the University of Illinois Alumni Achievement Award, a pair of Edible New Mexico Best Food Writer Awards and numerous other honors. With her late husband, Bill, and on her own, she’s penned enough books on food and travel to endow a small library.

Her twenty books on food cover broadly the subjects of outdoor cooking and American home cooking and are noted for their depth of research and cultural background. Cheryl and Bill’s classic Smoke & Spice, on real American barbecue, has sold some million and a half copies and has remained in print for three decades.

Craig Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the hit Netflix original drama. The books have won multiple awards: the Nouvel Observateur Prix du Roman Noir, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, Le Prix 813, the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award, the Mountains & Plains Book of the Year, the Prix SNFC du Polar, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, the Watson Award, Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year, the Rocky and the Will Rogers Award for Fiction. Spirit of Steamboat was selected by the Wyoming State Library as the inaugural One Book Wyoming. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

1970s in a day.” The end of the ranching business was a familiar theme for him.

In 1969 renowned Kiowa poet and author N. Scott Momaday became the first Native American to win the

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his novel House Made of Dawn, about a young man returning from war and coming to terms with the hardship of life at his Jemez Pueblo home. In 2007, Momaday received the National Medal of Arts for his celebration and preservation of Native American oral tradition. Often contemplating nature, Momaday’s rich, melodic voice recites his own poetry in the documentary Return to Rainy Mountain: “I am the rolling thunder and the bursts/Of torrents upon rock.”

The dean of Indian Country mysteries, known for his cultural sensitivity in telling the world about earthen hogans, evil skinwalkers and other elements of Navajo tradition, master novelist Tony Hillerman began writing about Navajo tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in the seventies. When I visited his Albuquerque home for an interview in 2004, the famed author admitted to still shopping at Wal-Mart and not having a smidge of Indian blood in him. Tips for how to write a bestseller? He said that Elmore Leonard advised him, “Leave out the stuff the reader skips.”

Author of the quintessential New Mexico novel, 1972’s Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya was considered by many to be the “godfather” of Chicano literature. With

his story about a young boy learning about herbs and magic in a small village, the longtime Burqueño brought curanderas, New Mexican Spanish and the fictional detective Sonny Baca into the national lexicon. He often wrote of the search for identity in Latino culture, winning numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts, along the way.

Northern New Mexico’s natural elements, cultural clashes and idiosyncratic individuals have been memorably depicted by longtime Taoseño John Nichols in books such as 1974’s The Milagro Beanfield War (made into a film by Robert Redford) and the much later The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, in which he confides, “I love the chilly winds and dying leaves and the first snow

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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WHO’S WHO...WHO’S HERE

MING TANG-EVANS

HANNAH DUNPHY

SCOTT MCDERMOTT

DIEGO BERRUECOS GATOPARDO

LAURIE SMITH

SARAH SHATZ

Asma Khan

Phil Klay

Jon Krakauer

Valeria Luiselli

Deborah Madison

Emily St. John Mandel

Asma Khan is the chef and owner of Darjeeling Express in London, England. She began her food career in 2012 with a supper club in her home. In 2015, she opened a pop-up, and Darjeeling Express the restaurant opened its doors in June 2017. A year later, her debut cookbook, Asma’s Indian Kitchen was published. Khan is the first British chef to feature in Netflix’s Emmy-nominated Chef’s Table. Her episode also received a 2020 James Beard Award nomination.

Her second cookbook, Ammu: Indian Home Cooking to Nourish Your Soul, will be published in 2022.

Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and Missionaries, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2020 by The Wall Street Journal. His new book is a provocative collection of essays entitled Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in the Age of Endless, Invisible War. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and elsewhere. He teaches fiction at Fairfield University, in Connecticut, and is a board member of Arts in the Armed Forces.

Jon Krakauer is the author of eight books, including Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven and Missoula. Raised in Corvallis, Oregon, he graduated from Hampshire College in 1976, after which he worked as a carpenter, then a commercial fisherman in Alaska before embarking on a career as a writer. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to the award citation, “Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer.”

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks; Faces in the Crowd; The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions; and Lost Children Archive.

Luiselli is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the Dublin Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Carnegie Medal and an American Book Award and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a writer in residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.

Deborah Madison is the author of fourteen cookbooks and the founding chef of Greens restaurant, in San Francisco.

Her books have won numerous awards, including two Julia Child Cookbook of the Year awards, for The Savory Way and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, as well as honors from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, including a Trailblazer award in 2019. She has received the MFK Fisher Award from Les Dames d’Escoffier and four James Beard awards.

Her latest book is a memoir, An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables.

Emily St. John Mandel is the bestselling author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel, which was chosen by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020.

Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, has been translated into thirty-three languages and was made into a limited series on HBO Max. Her new novel, Sea of Tranquility, will be published in April 2022. It is a story of art, time, love and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon 300 years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. Originally from Canada, Mandel lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

1970s flurries that sweep intermittently down this lean valley.”

A Canadian who relocated to Santa Fe, David Morrell came to prominence with 1972’s First Blood, the action novel that introduced his bestselling Rambo series. He has made a lasting career out of high-action thrillers such as The Brotherhood of the Rose, prompting one reviewer to laud him as “the mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions.”

Novelist, poet and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko, whose heritage includes Laguna Pueblo, Mexican and European roots, made a major splash with 1977’s Ceremony, prompting Sherman Alexie to praise it as “the greatest novel in Native American literature.” She notices how

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1980s turquoise stones brighten by absorbing the moisture of rain and how a wren behaving oddly might be a messenger from the spirit realm. Metamorphosis myths figure into her work, which won her the coveted MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant in 1981.

The first Native American to serve as poet laureate of the United States, and only the second person to serve three terms in that role, Joy Harjo, of the Muscogee Nation, is a writer, performer, poet-warrior and musician who studied, then taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts furthering storytelling’s oral tradition. Her nine books of poetry and two memoirs have garnered many awards, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and an American Book Award.

The inimitable Cormac McCarthy arrived in the Southwest on a MacArthur Fellowship to write 1985’s lauded Blood Meridian. He hit it big with 1992’s existentialist western All the Pretty Horses, about three young men who ride south to Mexico on horseback, searching for somewhere not yet ruined. Protagonist John Grady Cole feels “a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret.” McCarthy pursues a low profile, but he’s one of Santa Fe’s own.

Of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca began writing poetry in prison, publishing Martin

WHO’S WHO...WHO’S HERE

KATE RUSSELL

DARREN VIGIL GRAY

George R.R. Martin

N. Scott Momaday

George R.R. Martin is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of several novels, including those of the acclaimed series A Song of Ice and Fire as well as related works such as Fire & Blood, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The World of Ice & Fire. The books acquired an even larger audience with the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones, which won numerous awards and became one of the most influential shows in television history. Some of his other novels and collections from outside the world of Westeros include Tuf Voyaging, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag, Dying of the Light, Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle) and Dreamsongs Volumes I and II. As a writer-producer, he has worked on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast and various feature films and pilots that were never made.

He lives with his lovely wife, Parris, in Santa Fe.

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 numerous awards and honors, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize and the 2021 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A longtime professor of English and American literature, Momaday earned his PhD from Stanford University and retired as Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. He lives in New Mexico.

and Meditations on the South Valley in 1987. He’s written poetry, memoirs, essays and the screenplay Bound by Honor, which Taylor Hackford made into the crime drama Blood In, Blood Out. The charismatic Baca often ponders social justice in his work.

Chicana author and playwright Denise Chávez emerged with 1986’s The Last of the Menu Girls, about a young woman growing up in southern New Mexico.

Subsequent novels, including Loving Pedro Infante and A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, brought her the American Book Award in 1995. She’s known for exploring the borders between people, as well as for creating the multifaceted Border Book Festival (now defunct) in her hometown of Las Cruces.

COURTESY OF AUTHOR

PATRICIA NIVEN

James McGrath Morris Sarit Packer & Itamar James McGrath Morris is Srulovich the author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power — which The Wall Street Journal named one of the five best books on American moguls and Booklist placed on its list of the ten best biographies of 2010 — 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 Biographers International Organization (BIO) and makes his home in Santa Fe. His latest book is Tony Hillerman: A Life.

Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich opened Honey & Co. in 2012, launching their restaurant Honey & Smoke and deli Honey & Spice close behind. Cooking and baking since she was five, Sarit trained at Butler’s Wharf, at the Orrery under Chris Galvin, J Sheekey, the OXO Tower, Ottolenghi and Nopi. Itamar Srulovich was born and raised in Jerusalem. Cooking since the age of five and leaving a great mess in the kitchen ever since, Itamar trained on the job in various places in Tel Aviv where he met Sarit. Their debut book, Honey & Co.: Food from the Middle East (2015), was named Cookbook of the Year by The Sunday Times (UK.) They have written three more books, Honey & Co: The Baking Book, Honey & Co.: At Home and their latest book, Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant. They host a podcast, Honey & Co.: The Food Sessions.

JACK PARSONS

WALTER W. NELSON

Carmella Padilla

Douglas Preston

Carmella Padilla is a journalist, author and editor who explores intersections in art, culture and history.

She has published extensively, including in The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Latina and American Craft. Recent 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; and The Chile Chronicles: Tales of a New Mexico Harvest. A native Santa Fean and nineteenthgeneration New Mexican, she is a recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Douglas Preston has published thirty-seven books, both fiction and nonfiction, thirty-one 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 currently serves as president of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.

1990s Bestselling mystery novelist Michael McGarrity burst onto the literary scene in 1996 with his series involving Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney and his estranged son, half Mescalero Apache cop Clayton Istee. It’s a macho, cynical world with complex plots, taut prose and a shrewd shorthand for pinning locations. Take Ruidoso.

It’s populated by middle-class Texans who moved there “looking for a less expensive Southwestern version of the Aspen lifestyle.”

With 1993’s So Far from God, poet, novelist, essayist and playwright Ana Castillo took a place on the national stage, which she continues to hold, conveying her often-experimental perspective on Latina/Chicana/ Indigenous feminism and gender.

Douglas Preston is the author of 37 bestselling fiction and nonfiction books, including The Monster of Florence, Cities of Gold and the Pendergast thriller series written in collaboration with Lincoln Child. Science, exploration, technology, history and adventure frequently figure in his work — fitting for the former editor for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has been living in Santa Fe since 1986.

Compelling characters, plots that pull them through changes and a strong voice are the purview of Jo-Ann Mapson, whose women’s fiction never disappoints.

Consider Finding Casey, in which the resident ghost in a 100-year-old Pueblo-style adobe observes, “Already she’s in love, and what I know of love is this: it can fill

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WHO’S WHO...WHO’S HERE

STEPHEN LAND

SERGIO SALVATORE

MARK PAUL PATRICK

STEPHEN LAND

ADRIAN OCTAVIUS WALKER

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Rebecca Roanhorse

Bob Shacochis

Henry Shukman

Hampton Sides

Bryant Terry

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s most recent book is the novel The Five Wounds, which Kirkus Reviews called “a brilliant meditation on love and redemption.”

She is also the author of the story collection Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. It was a New York Times Notable Book and was named a Best Book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Quade is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, Guernica, The Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She teaches at Princeton University.

Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling author of speculative fiction and the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

She has published several novels, including two in the Sixth World series; Star Wars: Resistance Reborn; Race to the Sun; and the epic fantasy Black Sun, winner of the Reading the West award. She has also written for Marvel Comics and for television, with projects optioned by Amazon Studios, Netflix and AMC. Her next novel, Fevered Star, will be published in April.

She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband and daughter.

Bob Shacochis is a novelist, essayist, journalist and educator. His work has received the National Book Award for First Fiction, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is the author of two short story collections and two novels, Swimming in the Volcano, finalist for the National Book Award, and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His The Immaculate Invasion, about the 1994 military intervention in Haiti, was a finalist for the New Yorker Literary Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year and was named a Notable Book of 1999 by The New York Times.

Shacochis currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Florida State University. He lives in Florida and New Mexico.

Henry Shukman, author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir, teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an appointed teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center. Previous to this, Shukman had a career as an award-winning author and poet. His struggles and traumatic experiences as a youth, combined with a spontaneous awakening experience at nineteen, paved the way for Shukman to develop a well-rounded approach to spirituality and meditation — one that includes love for self and the world as its foundation.

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.

Bryant Terry is a James Beard Award-winning chef and educator and the author of Afro-Vegan and Vegetable Kingdom. He is renowned for his activism and efforts to create a healthy, equitable and sustainable food system.

He is currently the chef-inresidence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, where he creates programming that celebrates the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, culture and the African Diaspora. His work has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post, on CBS This Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered. San Francisco magazine included Terry among the “11 Smartest People in the Bay Area Food Scene” and Fast Company named him one of “9 People Who Are Changing the Future of Food.” His latest, Black Food, is a beautiful, rich and groundbreaking book exploring Black foodways within America and around the world.

1990s a house, and change it into a home. A home can make people happy, for a while.”

Gracious Southwest poet Luci Tapahonso — the Navajo Nation’s inaugural poet laureate — wrote lyrically of her daughter giving birth in her 1997 collection Blue Horses Rush In, which won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association’s 1998 Regional Book Award for Adult Nonfiction: “Her heart pounded quickly and we recognized/the sounds of horses running: the thundering of hooves on the desert floor. . . . She arrived amid a herd of horses.”

Luminaries don’t get any brighter than Santa Fe’s

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2000s

own novelist, screenwriter and producer George R.R. Martin, who penned the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted into the Emmy Award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones. Time dubbed him “the American Tolkien.” He is a generous investor in Santa Fe’s cultural life, reviving the Jean Cocteau Cinema, helping launch Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return and founding the nonprofit Stagecoach Foundation.

Hampton Sides brought narrative history to the forefront

Magdalena-based Stephen Bodio wrote so expressively of that village in 1990’s Querencia that I once detoured off I-40 onto U.S. 60 just to drive through it — a place where in winter, “often the peaks, 10,000 feet above sea level and four above the plain, would be invisible for days at a time, decapitated by clouds.”

Sandi Ault’s environmental mystery series about BLM

with five signature narrative history books, including Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (2006) and On Desperate Ground: The Epic Story of Chosin Reservoir — the Greatest Battle of the Korean War (2018), which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post. He has been living and writing in Santa Fe for about 30 years.

agent Jamaica Wild takes on Rocky Mountain rough terrain, wildfires and local sayings like, “Ayuda a otros y Dios te ayudará” (Help others and God will help you).

WHO’S WHO...WHO’S HERE

SARAH SHATZ

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021–2023 poet laureate of Santa Fe. His poetry chapbook Life’s Prisoners received the 2017 Turtle Island Poetry Chapbook Award. His first full-length poetry collection is Psalms at the Present Time (Flowstone Press, 2021). Wellington has also worked for more than twenty years as a journalist and essayist, publishing magazine feature articles, political commentary, poetry and book reviews in publications such as Dissent, The Nation, The Progressive, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Common Review, Boston Review, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education and n+1.

He also writes a syndicated editorial column for the Progressive Media Project.

Since 2016, he has been a writing/communications fellow with Center for Community Change, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that supports low-income people of color.

CHRIS CLOSE

ROBERT GALLAGHER

JENNIFER MCVEY

KENNY BRAUN

RICH KESSLER

Colson Whitehead

Don Winslow

Lawrence Wright

Louise Boyle

Kathleen McCleery

Colson Whitehead is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (an Oprah’s Book Club selection and winner of the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Nickel Boys, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him only the fourth writer to win two Pulitzers in the Fiction category. Whitehead’s acclaimed new novel, the bestselling Harlem Shuffle, was published in September 2021. His other books include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt and a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. Among his other awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2020 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Don Winslow is the celebrated author of twenty-two award-winning international bestsellers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Force and The Border, the No. 1 international bestseller The Cartel, The Power of the Dog, Savages and The Winter of Frankie Machine. Savages was made into a feature film by three-time Oscarwinning writer-director Oliver Stone. The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border sold to FX to air as a major television series, and The Force is soon to be a motion picture from 20th Century Studios starring Matt Damon and directed by James Mangold.

Winslow is the author of three New York Times Critics Choice Best books of the year. A former investigator, antiterrorist trainer and trial consultant, Winslow lives in California and Rhode Island.

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of eight books of nonfiction, including In the New World, Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, Thirteen Days in September, The Terror Years, and God Save Texas and two novels, God’s Favorite and The End of October. His books have received many prizes and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower.

He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas. His latest book, The Plague Year, was published in June 2021.

Louise Boyle is the New York-based senior correspondent for The Independent, an international news organization. Louise has spent fifteen years covering climate, politics and social issues for a range of leading news organizations.

Kathleen McCleery is an award-winning broadcast journalist who’s worked for PBS and NBC during her four-decade career.

She reports and produces occasional stories for the PBS NewsHour on wide variety of topics including politics, the environment, education, science, health care and the arts. Before moving to New Mexico, she was the program’s deputy executive producer.

Kathleen taught journalism at Princeton University in 2016 and 2018, focusing on media coverage of elections. She and her husband live in Corrales, where she is active in the Corrales Arts Center.

Furthering her dad’s mystery series set on the Navajo Nation, Anne Hillerman evolves the characters of Leaphorn, Chee and particularly Bernie Manuelito into new plotlines. For instance in Stargazer, Officer Manuelito starts out on a typical day’s work on the rez, serving a bench warrant and dealing with a herd of loose cattle obstructing traffic, but then gets pulled into a case involving her old college roommate Maya, who’s been struggling with addiction and is now confessing to a murder. Bernie isn’t buying it, though.

Snappy mystery novelist Stuart Woods, who’s had dozens of bestsellers (you read that right), often involves Santa Fe defense lawyer Ed Eagle in his novels, with frequent protagonist Stone Barrington flying himself (you read that right too) to Santa Fe Airport.

Santa Fe-based Wolf Schneider has worked as editor in chief of “The Santa Fean,” consulting editor of “Southwest Art” and editor of “American Film.” She reads a couple of books a week.

Kirstin Valdez Quade set her 2021 debut novel, The Five Wounds, in contemporary Northern New Mexico, where a teenager copes with pregnancy and a family in which everyone struggles to do their best. The book was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

Ambidextrous and unbranded Margaret Atwood is never cut and dried

BY JENNIFER LEVIN Margaret Atwood has a wild imagination. The prolific Canadian author builds fully realized dystopian worlds in which people wrestle with life’s most pressing ethical questions — environmental destruction, religious faith, population control — in the most intimate ways. She’s beloved by readers for consistently bringing high literary style to books you can’t put down, and she’s been at it since the 1960s. When Hulu adapted her most well-known work, 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, into a streaming series in 2017, a whole new generation was introduced to her more recent speculative fiction trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013).

Although she’s become known for her especially prescient take on earth’s not-too-distant future, it wasn’t always like this. Atwood used to write about everyday mundanities — relationships, work and what women think about when they’re alone. Although some of her books were tinged with magical realism, it was the realism that stood out in such early novels as Surfacing (1973) and Life Before Man (1980).

After delving into historical fiction with Alias Grace in 1996, her novels became increasingly futuristic. Why did Atwood veer from the gritty here and now to the dystopian “What if”? Did something draw her from one world to another? Not really, she said in an email interview during her book tour for a new nonfiction collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, now out from Doubleday.

“I haven’t abandoned realism. The story collection Stone Mattress [2014] is firmly in that tradition. The Blind Assassin [2000] is too, as the sci-fi in it is written or narrated by one of the characters. . . . But realism as the 19th century understood it hasn’t been completely with us for some time. I expect this is a longer conversation, the title of which might be, ‘What is fiction, and why do human beings do it?’”

She offers a more crucial answer to my question: “I try to make my invented worlds as realistic as possible. I believe they are true to the fundamentals of human choice and existence, as well as to history. As I’ve often said, I can’t do other galaxies. Only this planet, and only us.”

The Handmaid’s Tale never leaves this world, and Atwood’s alarming vision of women rebelling against being classed by their wealth and ability to breed seems even more plausible now than it did in the 1980s. Hulu’s adaptation, which has four seasons with an anticipated fifth on the horizon, changed significant aspects of Atwood’s book. Among other tweaks, the show gave us a much larger, racially diverse cast and extended the plot beyond the scope of the novel. The Testaments, a sequel published in 2019, isn’t a direct continuation of the original novel.

“The things and people in The Testaments are firmly connected to those in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s like invisible mending — you can’t see it,” she wrote. “Nothing in it contradicts The Handmaid’s Tale. I was picky about that.” She began the novel the year before the first season of the TV series premiered and didn’t watch the show

Margaret Atwood is On Stage at the Santa Fe Literary Festival from 9:15 to 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 21.

until she was well into writing, so it doesn’t actually build upon that world either, which doesn’t stop readers from finding connections, intended or not. “[Actress] Ann Dowd has been a marvelous Aunt Lydia,” Atwood added. “I sometimes hear her voice in The Testaments, and [I’m] lucky to have her reading Aunt L in the audiobook.”

If one thing unites all of Atwood’s novels, it’s the seamlessness of her prose. There are no glitches. No detail or moment calls too much 2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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attention to itself, and nothing is glossed over too quickly. Readers dive into the story from the first line, without obvious exposition or scene-setting. “I know I was all right Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual,” she writes in the opening of The Edible Woman, her 1969 debut about a young woman breaking free of expectations. The early feminist take on bodily autonomy offers a surreal foray into the symbolism of disordered eating — evidence of Atwood’s long-standing affection for off-kilter narratives as well as for writing about complicated, hard-to-like women.

“Probably it is the subject of women that has most completely dominated Ms. Atwood’s novels,” author Lorrie Moore wrote in her review of The Robber Bride for The New York Times in 1993. “That women are individuals, difficult to corral, a motley and uneasy sisterhood; that feminism is often hard going and hard won, sabotaged from within as well as without; that in the war between the sexes there are collaborators as well as enemies, spies, refugees, spectators and conscientious objectors — all this has been brilliantly dramatized in Ms. Atwood’s work.”

Atwood has received many honors and awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovator’s Award (2012), the Franz Kafka Prize (2017), the Booker Prize (2019) and the British Academy President’s Medal (2020). She’s in her 80s now and her prose just keeps getting more inventive, more confident. Perhaps the finest example of her literary chops can be found in Hag-Seed, her 2016 adaptation of The Tempest for the Hogarth Shakespeare series, for which well-known authors rewrote Shakespeare plays as contemporary novels.

In what she calls a hefty though enjoyable workout, Atwood re-envisioned Prospero as Felix, an ousted artistic director of a theater festival, usurped by an ambitious fraud who ultimately leaves the

world of drama to go into politics, while Felix self-exiles in a rented hovel and directs Shakespeare for inmates at a local prison. Hag-Seed is a masterwork of adaptation that perfectly captures the Bard’s sometimes caustic insights into humanity, as well as his love for it, and showcases the overwhelming power of modern technology without going so far as to call it sorcery.

To write Hag-Seed, Atwood read The Tempest numerous times, watched every filmed version available and read theater history to find out how the play had been interpreted through the ages. “But most importantly,” she asked, “What were the central motifs of the original play? Once you zero in on the speeches, everyone in the play is imprisoned at some time or another. “So: What is freedom? A pretty important question right now.” The Tempest’s characters have been interpreted many ways: “Is Caliban a clown? Is he a rapist? Is he a romantic figure? Is he a thwarted revolutionary? Is he evil? Is he oppressed? He’s been played all these ways. The text supports them all. Shakespeare is never cut and dried.”

Nor is Atwood. She writes essays, short fiction, graphic novels and poetry in addition to novels, and even her darkest subjects tend to be imbued with a degree of ambivalent humor. Asked what inspires her to sometimes write poetry instead of fiction, she answered, “A small, winged creature comes down out of the sky carrying a neon sign that says POEM or FICTION. “Sorry, joke.

“It’s a question of rhythms, and also of stories. I’m ambidextrous in that way. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t write both. I also received no career grooming or ‘branding’ instructions. So anything went, and goes.”

Jennifer Levin is a writer, arts journalist and communications professional in Santa Fe.

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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COLSON WHITEHEAD

JO BAXTER

CHRIS CLOSE

On the Cover

C Meet the Artist!

Thursday, Friday & Saturday May 19, 20 & 21 1-5 PM 656 CANYON ROAD • 505.988.7215 32

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

OLSON WHITEHEAD is the shape-shifting, award-winning author of eight novels and two works of nonfiction.

He writes about the past, the future and sometimes the future-past. His prodigious imagination is propelled by elements of genre fiction — detective stories, sci-fi — as well as philosophical, social and historical concerns. When looking for the topic of his next novel, he has said he pursues whatever idea he finds himself thinking about the most.

The lifelong New Yorker’s breakthrough work was The Underground Railroad, a fantastical take on a literal train for people escaping slavery, for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize, in 2017, as well as the 2016 National Book Award. In The Nickel Boys, for which he won

the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, Whitehead explores the violence student inmates face at the Nickel Academy, a 1960s reform school based on a real Florida institution.

Whitehead graduated from Harvard University in 1991 and wrote his first novel while working as a reporter for The Village Voice. Published in 1999, The Intuitionist is about two groups of elevator operators with competing ideologies. His most recent work, Harlem Shuffle (2021), is a crime caper set against the vivid backdrop of Harlem at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Whitehead doesn’t stick to one literary style; his books are linked by a focus on the experiences of Black Americans during different historical periods, as well as the intricate plotting of immersive worlds for his characters, and in turn his readers.

— JENNIFER LEVIN

Native American petroglyphs in the Upper Río Grande Valley

Taos Pueblo

PHOTOS BY GENE PEACH

Reading and Writing

Early New Mexico

T

BY PATRICIA GREATHOUSE

he people who lived in the area that is now New Mexico began leaving powerful images chipped on rock a very long time ago — long before the Mayflower sailed or the conquistador Juan de Oñate arrived to establish a colony for Spain. Most of the images, depicting events, animals, humans and religious symbols, were made by Puebloan people around AD 1300. A few date back to 2000 BCE. Chipped on rock, they remain.

While some of the petroglyphs are now indecipherable, the effort to tell stories is clear. Drawn to the beauty of the land, the expansiveness of the skies and the hope for a better life, Native people, Spanish and Anglo settlers, and passersby kept their stories alive through the oral tradition of storytelling. A select few wrote their thoughts and observations down, where they remain unchanged — like the chipping on the rocks.

One of the first to relate his adventures, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá (1555-1620) was born in Mexico but earned a bachelor of letters at the University of Salamanca in Spain. By 1598 he was a captain in the Oñate expedition that founded Santa Fe. Villagrá participated in some of the most brutal episodes of Spanish subjugation of Native people, including the Battle of Acoma, but failed to attain the position he desired due in part to his execution of two deserters from the Oñate expedition. He returned to Spain to seek redress, in 1610 writing Historia de la Nueva Mexico — an epic poem about the entrada and the land — as a petition to King Philip III for an appointment. He received his appointment and died on the ship returning to New Spain. His work is celebrated as the beginning

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of Latino literature in the New World.

The first white man to record the wonders of the West, Zebulon Pike (1779-1813) lived a very full life in only 34 years. His first foray started in 1807, when Thomas Jefferson sent 15 men to explore the Louisiana Purchase and Colorado Territory. On the journey, Pike

Penitente Morada in Abiquiú

met Native Americans and reported on the peak later named for him. Captured by Spanish colonists, he fortuitously got a tour of the territory, including the pueblos and Albuquerque. Along the way, he wrote a fascinating journal that described the agriculture, military, trade, economy, culture, laws and peoples of the area.

He recognized these people as a mixture of Spanish, mestizo and Indian. The local settlers treated him well, village priests greeted him and he attended banquets as an honored guest. He noted that the churches were filled with art and santos, although they were rough adobe on the outside. His diary is a comprehensive record of life in New Mexico in the early 1800s.

A consumptive and dyspeptic, Josiah Gregg (1806-1850) moved west on orders from his doctor. Joining a caravan in Arkansas, he arrived in Santa Fe in 1831. He learned Spanish, became a trader and traveled between Missouri and Santa Fe four times, also venturing deep into Texas, Mexico and California, where he discovered Humboldt Bay. He was possessed of an insatiable curiosity and intelligence, working as a teacher, law student, doctor, photographer, bookkeeper, wagon train leader, explorer, geologist, naturalist, merchant and author. Among other firsts, he brought a printing press to New Mexico in 1834, allowing publication of the first territorial newspaper. He also recorded an early view of life in what became the New Mexico Territory.

Gregg’s two-volume The Commerce of the Prairies, published in 1844, describes every aspect of life in the land he traveled through.

On his last expedition, his company dispersed and he fell off his horse in a state of starvation and died.

The 11th territorial governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallace (1807-1905) led a fascinating life as a Civil War general, a member of the Lincoln assassination military commission and a U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire. He was also a writer. While most of us remember Ben-Hur as a movie, the story is based on Wallace’s book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, purported to be the most influential Christian book of the 19th century. Wallace completed Ben-Hur in his spare time while serving as governor.

Clearly he was a canny fellow, as this quote suggests: “All calculations based on experience elsewhere fail in New Mexico.”

Born in Switzerland and educated in the family banking business, Adolph Bandelier (1840-1914) found his life’s purpose in the study of Ancestral Puebloan dwellings. Inspired by

Domestic buffalo herd in Colfax County, NM. Tenaja Mountain in background.

American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, he became an ethnologist, historian and archaeologist at a time when academic interest in Native tribes of the United States was practically nonexistent. Drawn to Santa Fe at the age of 40, he began his work at Salinas Pueblo and went on to study ruins all over the Southwest, Mexico and Central America, leaving an extensive academic record. His book The Delight Makers, published in 1890, was the first work to fictionalize the daily lives and rituals of the people who had lived in the ruins he documented.

Best known for her novels of the Great Plains, Willa Cather (1873-1947) captured a breathtaking sense of place in Death Comes for the Archbishop, inspired by several visits to New Mexico in the 1920s. Her story of Bishop Lamy (fictionalized as Latour in the book) hews close to the facts, and her straightforward yet descriptive language captures the feel of a place that seemed frozen in time.

Cather paints the scenes of everyday life in a simple yet imaginary style: “The pueblo, indeed, seemed to lie upon the knees of these verdant mountains, like a favoured child. . . . In front of the village, the Spaniards had camped, exacting a heavy tribute of corn and furs and cotton garments. . . . It was from here . . . that [the Spaniards] set forth . . . on their ill-fated search for the seven golden cities of Quivera, taking with them slaves and concubines ravished from the Pecos people.” Cather’s treatment of the state’s three cultures is more observant than judgmental, unusual for the times, and her rendering of Latour’s spiritual struggle to reconcile his Christianity with the beliefs and rituals of the Native people is handled with great sensitivity. She won a Pulitzer Prize for the book in 1923.

In her bestselling book No Life for a Lady (1941), Agnes Morley Cleaveland (1874-1958) describes growing up wild, riding free on the range, herding cattle and shooting grizzlies (before they were extinct here) on her family ranch near the middle of nowhere.

Born in Cimarron, New Mexico, Cleaveland attended high school in Philadelphia and college at Stanford. Later she lived in California but often returned to New Mexico. Cleaveland’s book is a timeless read, thrilling in expressing the amount of freedom that she and her siblings exercised.

A descendant of Spanish pioneers, Cleofas Jaramillo (18781956) was born in Arroyo Hondo and educated at Catholic boarding schools. As a young woman she married a wealthy businessman, but fate was cruel, and she survived her husband and all three of their 2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1932

Mabel Dodge Luhan house, Taos, New Mexico, 1981

Neg No. 016755 Photo Archives, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe

Neg No. 107732 Photo Archives, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe

children. She was an energetic and able person, and when she saw the old Spanish customs dying or being subverted by newcomers, she founded La Sociedad Folklorica de Santa Fe (Folklore Society of Santa Fe), which still thrives and puts on a fashion show each year at Fiestas. To record the traditional food of New Mexico, she wrote The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes/Potajes Sabrosos (1939), an eye-opening view into what was still a culture very connected to rural practices like butchering, cheesemaking and collecting wild greens for the table. Three other books remind us how close New Mexico is to its Spanish roots: Spanish Fairy Tales/Cuentos de Hogar, Shadows of the Past/Sombras del Pasado and Romance of a Little Village Girl.

Wealthy Mabel Dodge (1879-1962) was better known for attracting talented and glamorous notables to her homes than for her writing. She began her career hosting well-known artists, writers and musicians at the former D’Medici Villa Curonia in Florence and then created one of the most famous salons ever in New York. She became a nationally syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers, at the same time feeling overwhelmed by what was then called manic depression. Following the advice of a famous psychiatrist, she began to write as therapy. Around 1919 she and her husband, Maurice Sterne, a painter, moved to Taos with a friend. They started a literary colony in a place where Dodge could totally reinvent herself. She met Tony Luhan of Taos Pueblo, who camped out in a tepee in her front yard and drummed at night to attract the married Dodge. Luhan, who was also married, managed to supplant Sterne and convinced Dodge to buy 12 acres on the east side of Taos. They married and built a house that eventually spread to 17 rooms. Soon people like D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), his wife, Frieda, and painter Dorothy Brett were there stirring things up. The list of the guests at the artist colony is impressive, and the patronage and encouragement of great talents may be Dodge’s strongest legacy. Her book Intimate Memories (1933) details her bisexuality.

As a ploy to keep them around, Dodge gave the Lawrences her ranch in San Cristobal, the only home they ever owned. Unable to accept such a large gift for nothing, they in turn gave Dodge the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. At the ranch, which belonged to Frieda until her death, D.H. wrote much of St. Mawr and The 36

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Plumed Serpent over the course of two visits. He found the beauty of New Mexico inspiring, writing, “The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. . . . In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new.” He later died of tuberculosis in Italy.

There’s nothing more telling about a culture than its food, and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert (1898-1991) understood that.

An educator, nutritionist, activist and polyglot, she wrote Historic Cookery, published in 1914, revised in 1946 and distributed throughout New Mexico by the agricultural extension service.

Born in Las Vegas before the 20th century, Gilbert taught home economics for the extension service and held classes in seven different counties and some pueblos, where she learned to speak both Tewa and Tiwa. Recruited by the United Nations, she created housekeeping demonstration centers for Tarascan Indians in Michoacán. Her books record New Mexico rural culture in all its plainness and simplicity. She wrote in The Good Life (1949) of folklore and folkways, and in We Fed Them Cactus (1954) of Spanish pioneering on the Llano Estacado. She also wrote a weekly column for the Santa Fe New Mexican for 20 years.

An outsider who fell in love with New Mexico, Oliver La Farge (1901-1963) was born in New York and raised in Newport, Rhode Island. He lived much of his adult life in Santa Fe, basing many of his books, both fiction and nonfiction, on the history, anthropology and culture of the Southwest. His foreword to a 1962 edition of Laughing Boy talks about his younger self, who wrote the book in 1927-1928 while he was finishing his anthropological studies: “Among them he had seen something that had moved him greatly, and this was his way of recording it. . . . For the writer and the Navajos that was an age of innocence. . . . The beginning anthropologist who went among them could believe, as they did, that their general condition and model of life, with all its hardships, simplicity, and riches, could continue indefinitely if only they were not interfered with.” Laughing Boy, a book that grabs readers by the heart and doesn’t let go, was written with all the earnestness that a young man could muster. It earned La Farge a Pulitzer Prize in 1929.

Mabel Dodge Luhan and group at camp, New Mexico, 1934 Left to right; Angelino, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Freida Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Myron Brinig and Kathleen Kiker

D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, moved to the Homesteader’s Cabin on the Kiowa Ranch north of Taos in 1924. The ranch was a gift from Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Photo by Kerry Sherck

Neg No. 159391 Photo Archives, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe

Frank Waters (1902-1995), whose part Cheyenne father died when Waters was just 12, developed a deep connection to Native culture. Born in Colorado, he spent most of his life in the West, moving between states and jobs and marrying three times.

Eventually he moved to Taos, became friends with Tony and Mabel Dodge Luhan and worked as the editor of a bilingual (English and Spanish) Taos newspaper. From 1930 until his death in 1995, he wrote many novels, articles and nonfiction works about the Southwest, including The Man Who Killed The Deer in 1942 and Book of the Hopi in 1963. In The Man Who Killed The Deer, Waters writes in the cadence of Native speakers as he recounts their struggle for identity. He describes Martiniano, a tribal member who is sent to boarding school because of government “kwotas” and finds that he has lost his place on his return to the pueblo. His parents are dead, and he is caught between the traditional way and the white man’s way. Hungry, he kills a deer out of season, which makes trouble on both sides.

Paul Horgan (1903-1995) held 19 honorary degrees and mastered both fiction and nonfiction in more than 50 books — two about Josiah Gregg. He won two Pulitzers — the first for Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History and the second for Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times. Born in New York, he moved with his family to Albuquerque when he was 12. He became friends with Peter Hurd and J. Robert Oppenheimer, helped found the American Opera Company and served in many capacities with Wesleyan University. Great River, published in two volumes — the first Indians and Spain, the second Mexico and the United States — tells the history of the explorers, settlers and cultures along the Río Grande, from the ancients to the electrified modern world.

Born into a privileged family in New Mexico Territory at a place near Watrous, Peggy Pond Church (1903-1986) grew up exploring Native ruins and riding in Pajarito Canyon. When her father turned his elite hunting club into the Los Alamos School for Boys, she and her sister were sent away to boarding school. While she won prizes for her poetry at Smith College, she longed to return to the plateau. When she did, she married Fermor Spencer Church, a master at the school.

She also became a member of the far-off artists’ colony in Santa Fe. Wrenched by the U.S. government’s takeover of Los Alamos to create the Manhattan Project, the Churches fled to Taos. The House at Otowi

Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos is a double memoir of Church and Edith Warner, who ran a post office and shop at Otowi Bridge and was friends with important scientists as well as Santo Domingo Indians. Church also published This Dancing Ground of Sky (her collected poetry), Bones Incandescent (her collected journals), Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin and two bilingual children’s books: The Pancake Stories/Cuentos de Panqueque and Shoes for the Santo Niño/Zapatitos Para El Santo Niño.

One of the foremost Hispanic historians of New Mexico, Fray Angelico Chavez (1910-1996) was born in Wagon Mound, the oldest of 10 children. He was ordained as a Franciscan priest and served as a military chaplain in the Philippines in World War II. An eminent presence in Santa Fe for many years, he was an authority on the customs and history of the area and the church. He wrote 22 books (including two books of poetry), ranging from the genealogical bible of the state, Origins of New Mexico Families, to an account of the hidden spiritual practices of the northern mountains, My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico.

Environmental activist, park ranger, teacher, cult hero, poet and author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey (19271989) earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico. He fell in love with nature after a stint at Arches National Park and began his lifelong fight against the destruction of the environment. After he visited the Four Corners area, he described “a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds.” He continued, “For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same.” Abbey compiled his first book, Desert Solitaire (1968), from notes on his stay at Arches National Park and went on to write both fiction and nonfiction. Two of his novels, The Brave Cowboy (Lonely Are the Brave) and Fire on the Mountain became movies. In the end, he asked to be buried in a sleeping bag, in a place where he could go back to nature. His last words, “No comment,” were carved onto his headstone by friends.

Patricia Greathouse is a descendant of New Mexico pioneers and an avid reader.

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

The MADELEINE

moment

BY JULIA PLATT LEONARD Even if you’ve never read a word of Proust, you probably know about the “madeleine moment.” The narrator of the classic Remembrance of Things Past dips a small, shell-shaped cake into a cup of tea. Such a simple action, but so powerful that he’s instantly flooded with memories of his childhood.

What is your madeleine moment? Feel free to substitute an Oreo and a glass of milk or a piece of Bit-O-Honey in the backseat of the car on a family holiday or a potato baked in the embers of an open fire on your first camping trip. What food takes you back to a place and time, and a memory that is as clear today as it was then? And why is food such a potent reminder of the past?

The phenomenon is not surprising, says chef and Native foods educator Freddie Bitsoie, author of New Native Kitchen and featured food writer at the Santa Fe Literary Festival. “Food is such a primordial need,” he says. “We don’t need to be taught that we have to eat. You hear a baby cry. Most likely the baby’s hungry. The baby doesn’t know it’s hungry, so it cries.” For our ancestors, remembering what they ate, where it grew and if it was nourishing or noxious would have been Survival 101. Memory wasn’t a luxury but a requirement.

In that sense, food can be a collective memory that is passed down from one generation to the next. For chef Bryant Terry, educator, food activist and winner of James Beard and NAACP Image Awards, memory is at the heart of his latest book, Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from across the African Diaspora. “The calling to create Black Food for me was about recognizing those kind of ugly parts of our past, but [also] having this book that would be inspiring, that would focus on our agency and our magic and our brilliance and our creativity and the things that have brought us joy — and helped us not only survive but thrive,” he says.

Terry, the featured food writer at the May 21 Around the Table lunch at the festival, calls recipes the “through line” of Black Food.

As editor and curator, he worked with each contributor, and as he writes in the book, “I asked brilliant colleagues to offer dishes that embody their approach to cooking and draw on history and memory while looking forward.”

Black Food, sweet potato grits

He let people know “that I wanted it to be about them connecting with their food histories in the most authentic way and mining their own personal stories that they felt were important to share with the world to inspire others.”

Perhaps one reason food memories are so powerful is that often it’s not only the food we remember but who cooked it. For Black Food contributor Erika Council, it was her great-grandmother, who baked biscuits over an open fire in North Carolina to feed laborers working in the tobacco fields, and her daughter — Erika’s grandmother — who sold them at “plate sales” to support civil rights workers in the 1950s and ’60s. Today Erika makes them herself and shares the recipe — and the memories — with readers.

The recipe may have changed, but the memory forms a thread that connects generations of women.

That power of individual memories to inspire others is at the heart of Asma Khan’s latest cookbook, Ammu. Khan says ammu is probably a combination of the word amma, used in South Asia to mean “spiritual 2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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Chasing Smoke, joojeh kebabs, chicken in yogurt & saffron

PATRICIA NIVEN

used in South Asia to mean “spiritual mother,” and the Arabic word umm, also meaning “mother.” For Khan, chef and owner of Darjeeling Express in London and featured speaker at the SFLF Around the Table afternoon tea on Sunday, May 22, the woman at the heart of her book is her own mother. “I wanted to write a book in her lifetime talking about the bridge between us, which was food. . . . She didn’t communicate love in words, but she fed us in a way of saying that I mattered to her.”

Her mother ran her own catering business in Calcutta, something eyebrow-raising in a deeply patriarchal society. “She stayed very much steeped in her tradition, her culture, yet she did something radical,” Khan says. “I never heard her voice raised. She did this silently. She shook the world around her. And I think now, when I was writing this book I realized, “Wow, actually, this is why I am where I am, because of her.’”

She adds, “It was not just the food and the spices and the cooking I was learning. I was learning how to lead as a sole female leader.” For Khan, the book is also a thank-you letter for the way her mom showed love through the food, such as her chicken biryani. While biryani is typically served at celebrations, for Khan’s family it was the opposite. Her mother made biryani when Khan did poorly at school or her brother’s team lost. “It was just for her to tell us that it’s all right. We knew that the biryani was on the table because my math grade was bad or my brother lost his cricket match.”

What started out as a meal in sadness turned into something else.

“Instead of all that, we all had biryani and were very happy and then forgot the grief.”

While some of us remember teenage crushes on celebrities, the movies we watched or music we listened to, it’s food that dominates the memories of food writer Sarit Packer. She remembers cooking pasta with friends, mincing meat with her mom and bringing a cold beer to her dad in their backyard in Israel, and a tray of meat for him to grill.

“The one thing we always say, when you work with chefs, you understand that you are the type of people who remember what you ate when you were 4 or 5,” she says. “There’s a certain type of person who remembers their life through food.”

Both she and her husband, Itamar Srulovich, are that type of person.

A shared love of food drew them together, and they now run the hugely 40

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successful Honey & Co., Honey & Spice and Honey & Smoke restaurants and delis in London. They’re also the authors of four cookbooks, write a column for the Financial Times and are featured speakers at the Around the Table afternoon tea on Saturday, May 21.

For them, their cookbooks are much more than collections of recipes; they’re collections of food memories. “And we get to have this beautiful album to commemorate it and to remind us of these beautiful things and beautiful people and beautiful times,” says Srulovich.

For their latest book, Chasing Smoke, they traveled throughout the Middle East, cooking over fire, gaining inspiration for their own recipes and most importantly meeting people. “A place is only as memorable, only as beautiful as the people you met there,” they write in the book.

“The food in itself is not . . . interesting without the story behind it. And the story is the people around it. This is what’s interesting,” Srulovich says. “The food is the gateway, and it’s the door to it. But for us, everything we do — the restaurants and the books and these travels — they’re just a way for us to understand the world and connect to the world and relate to the world and bring some of ourselves to it.”

Memories are made by these chefs and food writers and then shared with us as we flick through the pages of their cookbooks, scribble shopping lists and dream up dinners — hungry to create memories of our own.

Freddie Bitsoie, Bryant Terry, Asma Khan, Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich are all appearing at Around the Table events at the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival.

Julia Platt Leonard is a food writer and co-founder of the Santa Fe Literary Festival.

PHOTO: © WENDY MCEAHERN FOR PARASOL PRODUCTIONS

Ammu, chicken biryani

Fine Handmade Rugs 130 Lincoln Ave. • 505-988-2393 • therugmanofsantafe.com 2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

41

INAUGURAL

www.sfliteraryfestival.org

SWEENEY

Bryant Terry and Freddie Bitsoie

Lunch with

Santa Fe Community Convention Center

and more!

Don Winslow and Lawrence Wright

George R.R. Martin,

Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo,

Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead,

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

Ticket Scan & Book Pick Up

Restrooms

Federal Place

PERALTA/LAMY

More Author Talks

Volunteer Check in

MILAGRO

OUTDOOR COURTYARD Don't miss our Free Community Stage.

A youth poetry slam — and more!

Open to the public

Beastly Books

DE VARGAS

O’KEEFFE

Green Room

Entrance to underground garage at 119 S Federal Place

The Colleen Cloney Duncan Shop at the Museum of Indian Arts (Museum Hill) 706 Camino Lejo

Museum of International Folk Art Shop (Museum Hill) 706 Camino Lejo

New Mexico Museum of Art Shop 107 W Palace Avenue

The Spiegelberg Shop New Mexico History Museum 113 Lincoln Avenue

VISIT

30 Authors 28 Captivating Author Events 4 Walk and Talks 6 Culinary Events

MAY 20-23, 2022

Santa Fe Community Convention Center | 201 W Marcy St, Santa Fe, NM 87501-2032

Bringing together influential authors, thinkers and passionate readers for an event as unique and inspiring as Santa Fe itself

Grant Avenue

LOBBY

to PLAZA

Marcy Street

entrance

Restrooms

Morning meditations and author talks with Joan Halifax and Henry Shukman

POJOAQUE/NAMBE

2nd FLOOR

Elevator to Second Floor

E

Quiet/Reading Room

OHKAY OWINGEH

TESUQUE

Story Ladder

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

Registration opens: Friday noon | Opening Reception: 5-6 pm | Hours: Saturday & Sunday - 7:30 am - close

his famous 1880 novel, Ben-Hur, one of the most popular best-selling novels in history.

in the area, including the 1610 Palace of the Governors. While in residence there, Territorial Governor Lew Wallace completed

of the Sun.” Later, Spanish and Mexican inhabitants and American soldiers established seats of government and military operations

historic downtown. Pueblo Indians who occupied the site beginning in the 13th century called these homelands the “Dancing Ground

The festival debuts at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, an LEED-certified green building in the heart of the city’s

“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”

Meet here for Walk and Talks and Tequila Tastings

Collected Works Pop Up Book Store Registration

Asma Khan and Honey & Co.

Tea with

POWER WORDS

THE OF

T

BY ZÉLIE POLLON

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

and enriched by that narrative.”

Luiselli says that Tell Me How It Ends merely adds one layer of narrative to an ongoing story, one that will have its final version when this generation of children and teenagers is able to write its own stories of forced diaspora. In the meantime, they will benefit from the versions that came before them, that tried to make sense of these experiences and tried to explain this dark moment in immigration history.

“As story goes, it’s layer upon layer that ultimately creates history and meaning,” she says. “I see Tell Me How It Ends as one layer toward the telling of that one event and its larger meaning.”

❦❦❦ Asma Khan tells her stories through food.

Khan is an Indian-born British chef whose London restaurant, Darjeeling Express, was featured in the TV series Chef’s Table.

She has written two cookbooks, Asma’s Indian Kitchen and Ammu: Indian Home Cooking To Nourish Your Soul, where she combines popular recipes with her own life story. Part of this story is about combating a patriarchal Indian culture that does not value girls as much as boys and often doesn’t value the work of women at all.

Khan is as much a social activist as a chef and is known as much for the all-female staff in her kitchen as for her cooking.

The first women she invited to be her staff were nannies in her children’s school. Her relocation from Calcutta to London was cold and lonely, and these women became her family. In fact, she so missed her mother’s cooking — the pungent smells and sound of oil crackling — that she began creating elaborate supper clubs. These became so popular that she was invited to open her own restaurant.

She hired her circle of friends to be her staff, not only to develop their kitchen skills but also to recognize and value them as women.

“Women are feeders of generations, and we are still uncelebrated,” she says.

The value she wants her staff to feel extends to pay, so everyone in the restaurant — including Khan herself — makes the same salary. No one should feel above anyone else there. As her popularity grows through her cookbooks and interviews, and

PHOTO JACK PARSONS

here is a famous, if controversial, experiment by Masaru Emoto, who researched the impact of words on a body of water. After exposing water to prayer, or taping both positive and negative words onto the liquid’s outer container, he alleged that, over time, words and intentions have the power to change water’s molecular structure. Beautiful words led to clear, crystalline structures, he said. Harsh words created a darkened mass.

Writers understand this power. It is the power not only to tell important stories but also to choose the words that make those stories come alive. We tell stories so others can hear them. We tell stories so others will be moved.

Writers Valeria Luiselli, Asma Khan and Sandra Cisneros have important stories to tell.

In Luiselli’s new work, Tell Me How It Ends, her storytelling is multilayered. She writes about interviewing migrant children as they reach the U.S. border in the hope of being allowed to stay.

Yet she realizes that in these interviews, the children must tell the “correct” story. They must first develop trust with a total stranger and then articulate their experiences — preferably their most traumatic moments — in language that can be understood. If they can’t, or if their stories don’t have the right trauma ingredients to earn them asylum status, they are deported without a trial.

Luiselli writes, “I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.”

Luiselli is writing about having one’s experiences “seen.” In many ways it is about having our own stories mean something; it is about seeing ourselves in a new, more gentle light that we hadn’t known how to articulate before.

“That’s when I feel seen,” she says, “when I’m gifted a narrative and a way of explaining things that I couldn’t before. The narrative is about others, but it’s in that integration between minds, or another’s experience and our lack of experience, that we are gifted

her voice reaches more people, Khan talks about extending her activism to women’s workshops. “I don’t want to teach them to cook. I want to teach them to lead!” she says.

Khan’s cooking was swept up in a social media tornado of the best kind this year when actors Paul Rudd and Dan Levy stopped into her Covent Garden restaurant for a bite to eat. A quick snapshot of the smiling trio went viral. “The next day my phone melted,” Khan told The Independent online.

“Asians everywhere were going crazy, and the idea that two big A-lister Hollywood guys were sitting and having a meal that so many could identify with as their culture, I think was quite incredible.”

The superstar vignette gets to the heart of what Khan wants to create through her cookbook, her food and her family stories.

“I don’t want people to get up from my table just having eaten food,” she said in another interview. “I want them to leave having understood a culture, a cuisine, a religion and an immigrant. That is very important for me.”

❦❦❦ Sandra Cisneros has been inviting people to understand Chicana culture for decades. After she wrote The House on Mango Street in the late 1980s, about a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, it was quickly banned by the Arizona School Board.

“The idea of students learning their suppressed history and taking power back, understanding their origins, felt subversive to them. It was a political awakening of a colonized people.”

Cisneros admits now that Mango was written from an angry place, “but I didn’t push ‘send’ right away,’” she says. She took time to contemplate and craft her message, and to use the power of her words most effectively.

Not much has changed since the book was banned. In fact, the situation has gotten worse, Cisneros says. She describes derision directed at Mexican people and other people of color, and an ongoing disempowerment of women. “In their mouth they have flamethrowers. We don’t see leaders telling people how to transform their fear or their rage. We see leaders who throw oil on the flame.”

Of course, some wordsmiths have long been addicted to a good and fast repartee, derisive and often cutting, with little thought of the long-term effects. But in today’s social media frenzy of sending first and thinking later, this can become downright toxic.

For lovers of words and young writers especially, Cisneros, a longtime practicing Buddhist, recommends the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, a revered Buddhist monk who passed away earlier this year. His book Being Peace transformed her writing, her activism and her life.

“It was earthshaking to me, the idea that if I wanted peace I had to be peace,” she says. “I had to be peaceful with my neighbors and my mother and the people across town. I had to be peaceful daily.

Everyone is upset with Ukraine, but how are we creating peace with each other? Are we really sincere about wanting peace if we’re being aggressive and careless with language?

“We have to be responsible for our words,” she adds, “especially as writers — when we send words, print words, when we communicate. We’re word workers. We have the power to plant seeds or to kill. It’s a great responsibility.”

Zélie Pollon (zpollon@gmail.com) uses the power of her words to inspire families who want to travel.

THANK YOU

2022 SANTA FE LITERARY FESTIVAL MAGAZINE SPONSORS

GIFT & GORMET

The Official Guide to the Santa Fe Literary Festival Proudly Published by:

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

45

One for the books Independent bookstores thrive in Santa Fe

Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse 202 Galisteo St., 505-988-4226, collectedworksbookstore.com

PHOTOS CARRIE MCCARTHY

BY KAY LOCKRIDGE It’s easy to see why the City Different is so popular with locally owned, independent bookstores. Ranked no. 6 for book lovers in a national poll conducted by Apartment Guide, Santa Fe draws people who love to read and those who love to write for them. The poll looked at 35,000 booksellers and libraries across the United States to determine the 10 best cities for bookworms in a mix of population centers, college towns and hub suburbs, among others.

Bradley Graham, former Washington Post reporter and editor, and now co-owner of Politics and Prose bookstores in Washington, D.C., says that people love the “quirky personality and warmth of indies.”

He says that running bookstores isn’t easy. “It requires superb customer service, dedicated staff who provide knowledgeable advice about what to read, an inviting environment in which to browse and shop and literary activities that connect patrons directly to authors through book talks and other programming.”

Running bookstores “most of all . . . demands a deep commitment to the local communities that sustain them,” Graham concludes.

In Santa Fe, no store exemplifies that commitment better than Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse, which has been catering to book lovers for 44 years and counting. Owned by Dorothy Massey since January 1996, Collected Works helped bring the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival to town and is the official bookstore of the festival.

During the festival, it will maintain a kiosk at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, selling books by presenters and others.

The first-ever SFLF “brings a phenomenal array of programs and authors” to the City Different, says Massey, who will oversee the pop-up bookstore at the convention center while maintaining regular hours at Collected Works over the weekend.

“The bookstore will be a central hub, especially on Monday, when attendees may join various authors for walking tours of the city,” Massey says. She notes that most of the tours begin at Collected Works. “Collected Works is a beacon in Santa Fe for all things 46

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

Garcia Street Books 376 Garcia St., 505-986-0151, garciastreetbooks.com

literary, as is the City Different for readers and writers.”

Here’s how to locate and contact 18 independent bookstores in Santa Fe, with an additional listing of seven museum gift shops that offer a substantial number of books relevant to museum collections.

Call before visiting to confirm hours.

Journalists are readers first who love libraries and bookstores. Kay Lockridge is a journalist.

Allá Bookshop

102 W. San Francisco St., Suite 20, 505-988-5416 New and out-of-print Spanish-language fiction and nonfiction, plus music and titles in Portuguese and French

The Ark Bookstore

133 Romero St., 505-988-3709, arkbooks.com Santa Fe’s “hidden treasure” provides a comprehensive selection of alternative books and gifts for the body, mind and spirit

Bee Hive Books

328 Montezuma Ave. 505-780-8051, beehivekidsbooks.com Name any book for, by or about children and this store will have it — or get it for you.

Beastly Books

418 Montezuma Ave., 505-395-2628, beastlybooks.com Created by George R.R. Martin, this quirky store features autographed and collectible books. It specializes in science fiction and fantasy, works by local authors, and merchandise and games from HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on books written by Martin.

Bennett Books

139 Cedar St., bennettbooks.org Specialized and rare books, particularly about G.I. Gurdjieff, plus magazines, stained glass and jewelry

Big Star Books & Music

329 Garfield St., 505-820-7827, bigstarbooks.com Located in the Railyard District, Big Star buys, sells and trades quality used books and CDs

Book Mountain

1302 Osage Ave., Suite A 505-471-2625, bookmountainsantafe.com Used paperbacks for sale and exchange, with books positioned horizontally for ease of browsing

Books of Interest

1333 Cerrillos Road, 505-984-9828, booksofinterest.com Well-curated collections of used books and music: “a place to escape and explore”

Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse

202 Galisteo St., 505-988-4226 collectedworksbookstore.com Cozy, longtime outpost for the latest bestsellers, popular “lost books,” coffee, snacks, plus readings and other events

Dumont Maps and Books of the West

407 W. San Francisco St. 505-988-1076, dumontbooks.com Antiquarian bookstore specializing in western America, with antique maps, out-of-print and rare books, antique prints and unusual ephemera

Garcia Street Books

376 Garcia St., 505-986-0151, garciastreetbooks.com Get to know bookstore dogs Simon and Grace and connect with the world of “diverse, artistic and literary creativity available through the world of books”; readings and other special events also on offer

Gunstock Hill Books

239 Johnson St., 505-983-0088, gunstockhillbooks.com A boutique bookstore housing more than 8,000 rare and antiquarian books, specializing in the American West

Nicholas Potter Bookseller

227 E. Palace Ave., Unit M 505-983-5434, nicholaspotterbooks.com Many treasures are found in this small but loaded store, featuring used and rare “books that will not Kindle, books that need to be owned and appreciated, books that have a soul”

op. cit.

157 Paseo de Peralta, 505-428-0321, opcit.com Located in DeVargas Center, op. cit. specializes in new, used and remaindered books, modern first editions, children’s books, cookbooks and mysteries

Palace Avenue Books

227 E. Palace Ave., 505-988-7232 A home for rare and used books for “readers with a discerning eye”

Photo-Eye Books

1300 Rufina Circle, Suite A3 505-988-5152, photoeye.com Specializing in photography books and photo exhibitions

St. John's College Bookstore

1160 Camino de Cruz Blanca, 505-984-6000 This college bookstore offers textbooks and aligned books for all majors offered by the college, including novels, history books and Americana.

Travel Bug Specialty Book Store, Coffee Shop and Taproom

389 Paseo de Peralta, Suite L 505-992-0418, mapsofnewmexico.com Maps, guides and books for travelers, plus luggage, language classes, coffee and beer

Museum shops offering books related to their collections Colleen Cloney Duncan Shop at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, 710 Camino Lejo, 505-982-5057 shopmuseum.org/pages/the-colleen-cloney-duncanshop-at-the-museum-of-indian-arts-culture Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Store 217 Johnson St. and 123 Grant Ave. (pop-up) 505-946-1000, okeeffemuseum.org/store Museum of International Folk Art Shop 706 Camino Lejo, 505-982-5186 shopmuseum.org/pages/museum-of-international-folk-art Museum of Spanish Colonial Art 750 Camino Lejo, 505-982-2226, spanishcolonial.org New Mexico Museum of Art Shop 107 W. Palace Ave., 505-982-1131 shopmuseum.org/pages/new-mexico-museum-of-art Spiegelberg Shop at the New Mexico History Museum 113 Lincoln Ave. 505-982-9543, shopmuseum.org/pages/the-spiegelbergshop-at-the-new-mexico-history-museum Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian/ Case Trading Post 704 Camino Lejo, 505-982-4636, Ext. 110 wheelwright.org/product-category/all/publications/

Libraries The tradition of reading and research flourishes in Santa Fe, where an abundance of libraries large and small serve the diverse interests of the city’s bookworms. The Santa Fe Public Library operates various branches across town every day from Tuesday through Saturday. The historic reading room in the downtown branch shouldn’t be missed. Many of the city’s museums and educational institutions also include little-known jewels, with space to engage in specialized book and archival research by appointment.

BARTLETT LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES AT THE MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART Special collections, folk art 706 Camino Lejo 505-476-1200 Open by appointment

CATHERINE MCELVAIN LIBRARY AT THE SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH

Special collections, anthropology and archaeology 660 Garcia St. 505-954-7234 sarweb.org/education/catherine-mcelvain-library-2/ Open by appointment

FRAY ANGÉLICO CHÁVEZ HISTORY LIBRARY AT NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM Southwest and state collections 113 Lincoln Ave. 505-476-5090 nmhistorymuseum.org/collections/history-library Open by appointment

INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS LIBRARY Indigenous art, special collections 83 Avan Nu Po Road 505-424-5715 iaia.edu/academics/library Open by appointment

LABORATORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY LIBRARY Special collections, anthropology and archaeology 710 Camino Lejo 505-476-1264 indianartsandculture.org/library Open by appointment

LIBRARY FOR THE BLIND AND PRINT DISABLED For visual and physical impairments 1209 Camino Carlos Rey 505-476-9700 nmstatelibrary.org/direct-and-rural-services/lbph Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday

MICHAEL S. ENGL FAMILY FOUNDATION LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE AT THE O’KEEFFE MUSEUM Georgia O’Keeffe, modernism 217 Johnson St. 505-946-1000 okeeffemuseum.libguides.com/library Open by appointment Libraries continued on page 48

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Libraries

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MUSEUM OF SPANISH COLONIAL ART/ SPANISH COLONIAL ARTS SOCIETY

PUEBLO OF POJOAQUE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Research and archives 750 Camino Lejo 505-982-2226 spanishcolonial.org/reference-library Open by appointment

Branch library 101 Lightning Loop 505-455-7511 puebloofpojoaquepubliclibrary.org Open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday

NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART

SANTA FE COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIBRARY

Research and archives 107 W. Palace Ave. 505-231-5065 nmartmuseum.org/research/archives/ Open by appointment

NEW MEXICO STATE LIBRARY

Southwest and state collections 1209 Camino Carlos Rey 505-476-9762 nmstatelibrary.org Open 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday

OLIVER LA FARGE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Branch library 1730 Llano St. 505-955-4862 santafelibrary.org Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

Academic library 6401 Richards Ave. 505-428-1352 sfcc.edu/offices/library Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday

SOUTHSIDE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Branch library 6599 Jaguar Drive 505-955-2820 santafelibrary.org Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

TAYTSUGEH OWEENGEH LIBRARY

Branch library Route 42 off Highway 84/285 505-303-1217 pueblooftesuquelibrary.org Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday

SANTA FE INSTITUTE LIBRARY

TERENCE S. TARR BOTANICAL AND HORTICULTURE LIBRARY AT THE SANTA FE BOTANICAL GARDEN

SANTA FE PUBLIC LIBRARY

VISTA GRANDE PUBLIC LIBRARY

SFI history, data sources 1399 Hyde Park Road 505-984-8800 santafe.edu/research/resources/library Open 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday by appointment Main library branch 145 Washington Ave. 505-955-6781 santafelibrary.org Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

Special collections, botany and gardening 725 Camino Lejo 505-471-9103 santafebotanicalgarden.org/visit-us/library Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday Branch library 7 Avenida Vista Grande, Suite B7-192 505-466-7372 vglibrary.org Open 11. a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday

Night Sky: Three Red wolves by Carole LaRoche - Limited Edition Print Carole LaRoche Gallery - 415 Canyon Road - Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505-982-1186 www.laroche-gallery.com | email@laroche-gallery.com 48

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

A leg up to literary success for Santa Fe students

STORY LADDER

BY ADELE OLIVEIRA Santa Fe’s young writers and literature enthusiasts have extra reason to look forward to the Santa Fe Literary Festival: Story Ladder, the festival’s educational branch, offers programming just for them, including a slam poetry stage, dedicated space at the Santa Fe Convention Center during the festival, access to readings and small-group interactions with authors.

“This year is a pilot program; we’re trying to keep it small, meaningful and community-oriented,” explained Clare Hertel, SFLF co-founder. Story Ladder is managed by Barbara Deswood, an educator who worked at the Academy for the Love of Learning.

On a macro level, “Story Ladder is about encouraging local students to share their stories through the written and spoken word,” SFLF co-founder Julia Platt Leonard wrote in an email. The festival promotes the power of storytelling for people of all ages, and Story Ladder is tailored to students.

For advice on building engaging content for young people, Hertel and her team turned to 826 Valencia, a national youth literacy and creative writing nonprofit founded by author Dave Eggers. They went to Eggers brimming with ideas, and he suggested keeping Story Ladder small at first and identifying existing organizations with which to collaborate.

One of Story Ladder’s biggest events is a reading and Q&A for middle schoolers at the Southside branch of the Santa Fe Public Library with Sandra Cisneros, author of more than a dozen books, including the 1980s classic — and summer reading standby — The House on Mango Street.

Students from several middle school classrooms will attend the event in person. It will also be broadcast on Zoom for other classrooms and the general public.

“Sandra is not only an award-winning author; she’s so dedicated to students and to helping them see themselves in books and literature,” said Maria Sanchez-Tucker, Santa Fe’s community services director and a former city library division director. “Her work has inspired me, and I know she’ll inspire the students.”

Sanchez-Tucker added that the library will host additional events

(including a pizza and discussion night for teens) in the days leading up to Cisneros’ visit. At the time of our interview, arrangements were still being finalized, but once they are set, events will be promoted at all three library locations, on the library’s social media channels (including @sfnmpl on Instagram) and in the email newsletter that goes out to library card holders.

A poetry slam stage sponsored by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry is among the festival’s confirmed events, and at press time, a partnership with Cooking with Kids — the hands-on, internationally flavored cooking program operating in a number of Santa Fe elementary schools — and SFLF food writers and cookbook authors was in the works.

Festival author and adviser (and Santa Fe local) James McGrath Morris recruited creative writing students from the New Mexico School for the Arts to help with festival grunt work — tasks like greeting and ticket taking — in exchange for a behind-the-scenes look at how a festival operates, plus free access to events and small-group or one-on-one time with lit-world luminaries.

“They’re earnest, interested in being taken seriously, and this gives them that opportunity,” McGrath Morris said of the students. “Most aspiring writers of that age are desperate to talk to someone who actually does it — they want to know how they meet an agent or make a living or get a contract, and teachers usually aren’t the source of that kind of information, what we as adults call networking.”

Exposure to authors Santa Fe teens and tweens read and admire is central to Story Ladder. In its inaugural year, it hopes primarily to help students make connections. As Hertel put it, “For some kids, getting to meet a Joy Harjo or a Margaret Atwood with 10 or 15 other people in the room can be life-changing.”

Know before you go At press time, Story Ladder events were still being finalized. For up-to-date programming and information on how to get involved, visit sfliteraryfestival.org/ story-ladder.

2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

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2022 Santa Fe Literary Festival

The tale of Zozobra goes back nearly 100 years, when Santa Fe artist Will Shuster built the first Old Man Gloom in 1924. And today, more than 60,000 people witness this fascinating and iconic event.

Write your own Zozobra story. Volunteer at burnhim@burnzozobra.com and attend ZozoFest, August 26-28 and The 98th Burning of Zozobra on Friday, September 2.

Looking for a fairy-tale ending? Since 1964, The Burning of Zozobra has raised more than $1.8 million for Kiwanis children’s programs in Santa Fe. Visit burnzozobra.com for all the details!

Kevin Box

WinteroWd Fine Art 701 Canyon Road • Santa Fe 505-992-8878 FineArtSantaFe.com

600 Canyon Road • Santa Fe 505-365-3992 KayContemporaryArt.com

Charlie Burk