Santa Fe International Literary Festival celebrates the power of story

The Santa Fe International Literary Festival returns for its fourth year with one-on-one conversations, readings and book signings by leading local and international authors.

“What is so unique to Santa Fe and northern New Mexico is the level of literary and political engagement we have here,” said Megan Mulry, the festival’s new executive director. “Some of these authors are speaking to the largest audiences they’ve ever spoken to live, while others have millions of followers on social media and are Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award winners.”

Headliners include National Book Award winners Percival Everett and Colum McCann, Pulitzer Prize winners Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jonathan Eig, bestselling authors Miranda July, Michael Pollan and Amy Tan, and other esteemed writers, such as Terry Tempest Williams, Marie Arana, Gabrielle Zevin, Heather Cox Richardson and Deborah Jackson Taffa.

In addition to the Santa Fe Community Convention Center programming, the festival also hosts a number of offsite events and day trips, including a Kakawa Chocolate Immersion event, which explores Mesoamerican and Indigenous uses of chocolate, and a “Writing on the Rails” workshop with Albuquerque poet Hakim Bellamy.

“These are wonderful additions to the programming that really add texture to the weekend, and which have their own resonances back to the conversations on stage,” Mulry said. “‘Writing on the Rails’ is a new event this year, and I think it’s a really beautiful way to give rise to the creative energy in all of us. Hakim Bellamy is such a compassionate and inspiring presence, and the scenery and writing prompts conspire to lift us out of the everyday.”

“I also think train travel — that sense of in-between-ness — fosters a sense of the liminal, which can be a very creative space to inhabit,” Mulry added.

The Santa Fe International Literary Festival was founded in 2022 by the husband-and-wife team of Mark Bryant and Clare Hertel, who have extensive experience in the publishing industry, along with their friend, the award-winning author and Santa Fe native Carmella Padilla.

“When they started talking about, ‘Why isn’t there a (literary) festival in Santa Fe?’ certainly I was all in, and very engaged,” Padilla said. “Because of the history of literature in the community and in the state, it was kind of a no-brainer.”

New Mexico has been home to scores of celebrated writers over the decades, from D.H. Lawrence to Cormac McCarthy to Sandra Cisneros.

“But when we talk about the literary history within the context of the festival, we really go back to before the written word,” Padilla said. “We think about the legacy of storytelling in New Mexico, which, of course, begins with Indigenous cultures, and oral history and oral storytelling traditions and rituals, which were also later practiced by the next waves of residents who were Spanish and Mexican. Every culture that has come here through time has a storytelling tradition, so there’s layers of it.”

Although attendance has grown every year, Hertel said they’ve worked hard to keep the festival from feeling impersonal.

“At last year’s festival, 15,000 seats were filled. I think this year, I’d be surprised if we don’t sell out, and it’ll be closer to 20,000 seats,” Hertel said. “But the convention center in Santa Fe is intimate in a lot of ways. We’re not like one of these sprawling book festivals. It feels very intimate and very curated, and I think that’s how we want to keep it.”

Hertel compared the shared experience of unity, joy and exuberance at the festival to sociologist Émile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence.

“To me, that is what the festival feels like,” Hertel said. “The first one was right out of the pandemic, and we kind of wondered, is this (feeling) just a pandemic thing? Like everybody is so excited to be together again that you feel like the room is lifting, you know? But the second and third year felt even more like that. So, I think we’ll have that again this year.”

“And God, we need that right now,” she said.

Hertel alluded to the recent waves of book bans and other ongoing political attacks on literature and culture.

“That’s why we feel it’s so important to have a festival like this. And literary festivals all over. I think we all like to say it’s sort of the light against the dark. Words and ideas and stories really capture the experience of being alive and remind us of our shared humanity,” Hertel said. “I really do feel like it lifts us. And this year in particular, to spend the weekend listening to some of the best writers of our time talk about things that they’ve spent many years thinking and writing about, I really do think that’s going to be a real respite, a real salve, for a lot of people.”

Hertel said she’s looking forward to meeting many of the authors at this year’s event.

“I am really excited to see Percival Everett. ‘James’ is one of my favorite books this year, and I think he’s definitely going to be one of the most important writers of our time,” Hertel said. “And we’ve wanted to get Michael Pollan for a while, so I’m super excited about him. He’s so thought-provoking.”

Hertel also said she “grew up on Amy Tan” but was especially charmed by Tan’s latest book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” about the author’s life as a bird watcher. “It’s a very sweet peek into who she is as a person and what her life is like,” Hertel said.

One of the most anticipated events of the festival is a special tribute to the trailblazing Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday, who died in 2024. The first Indigenous author to win a Pulitzer Prize, Momaday later taught at the University of New Mexico and “was very helpful and supportive” of the festival from the beginning, according to Hertel.

“Few people represent the power of story and storytelling in the way that Scott did,” Padilla said.

While many of the festival’s events are already sold out, Hertel emphasized that tickets are still available, including free tickets for students, educators, librarians and those with financial need.

Hertel also said she was surprised that tickets are still available for some of the headliners, including Jonathan Eig.

“His latest biography is about Martin Luther King (Jr.), and he is so amazing on stage,” Hertel said.

Despite New Mexico’s well-deserved reputation as a haven for writers, New Mexico’s literacy rates remain the lowest in the nation, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

That’s why the festival makes a special point to partner with schools and other educational institutions.

“While we’re not a literacy organization, I personally equate the idea of being exposed to great writers to the idea of becoming a more literate community and creating more awareness of the power of storytelling,” Padilla said. “Storytelling really binds us in our humanity and helps us develop empathy, and it also helps us explore other parts of the world and other experiences that we could probably never have in our lifetime.”

Everyone involved in the festival emphasized the importance of storytelling in helping people make sense of their world.

“We’re living in complicated times,” Mulry said. “Literature can provide a respite and a place of contemplation, which we all can use right now! At the same time, books give us a sense of hope, which can spur momentum and action.”

Santa Fe International Literary Festival celebrates the power of story