Textbookcharm
THE SANTA FE INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL IS SET ON MAKING US BRAINY AND BOOKISH
Until recently, Santa Fe International Literary Festival co-founder Mark Bryant didn’t have strong opinions about the criminal justice system in the U.S. Now, he’s passionate about the need for reform. The turning point came at last year’s festival, when New York writer Nana Kwame Adjei-brenyah discussed mass incarceration and unregulated capitalism. That expanded consciousness is one of the core goals of the festival, Bryant says.
“We want to bring in people who we think have something important or urgent to say about the world we live in,” says Bryant, one of three co-founders and curators of the festival along with Carmella Padilla and Clare Hertel. “These are tough times to live in, given the divisions in this country, living in a world that often feels under assault and an environment that feels under assault. It’s tempting to kind of give in to cynicism or apathy. We’ve sought authors who can challenge us, but also inspire us — people who will galvanize us and give us hope.”
Following is a guide to how to attack this book-filled beast.
WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE
The festival runs May 17-19 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Featured authors include Julia Alvarez, who wrote How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies; David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager; Robert Oppenheimer biographer Kai Bird; and activist and inaugural Albuquerque Poet Laureate Hakim Bellamy, who moderated last year’s discussion with Adjei-brenyah.
WHAT’S NEW
This year’s festival is the same number of days as last year’s and is held in the same location, but there are some differences. Some attendees last year said they were frustrated that multiple author events they wanted to attend were held simultaneously, Bryant says.
“We’re staggering things a bit this year in the afternoons,” he says. “I don’t want to have to choose between two of my favorite authors.”
Santa Fe Reads, part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read (see page 12), is a citywide book club during which readers of various ages read selected books; this year, it was moved from fall to coincide with the literary festival, says Santa Fe Public Library programs manager Jessica Gulliford. It runs through May 16 — the day before the literary festival opens — and explores the themes of the hero’s journey, female strength, and Greek mythology.
“We don’t want the festival to exist as a three- or four-day annual event,” Bryant says of the pairing. “We want to have more impact throughout the year.”
WHO’S WHO
Festival attendance has been on the upswing, Bryant says. “The first year, we sold 9,000 seats; last year, that number was 12,000,” he says. “This year, we’re well ahead of schedule on ticket sales. We’re looking at as many as 15,000 seats filled.”
BEGINNINGS
The festival’s organizers began discussing festival possibilities a number of years ago. “It began as, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to honor these centuries-old literary traditions, storytelling traditions, in New Mexico?’” Bryant says. “Santa Fe is rightly celebrated as a mecca for the visual arts, performing arts. The oral storytelling traditions of the Indigenous residents goes back to, I think, at least the 13th century.”
ON THE HORIZON
Bryant, like many in the Santa Fe arts world, anxiously awaits the results of the November presidential election. “Next year’s lineup for the festival, depending on what happens in November, could be very interesting,” he says. “Right now, we want to engage in a lot of different kinds of storytelling, a lot of genres.”
TIMING
Organizers had planned to hold the festival in the fall each year, but the pandemic derailed those plans. “A lot of it’s based on the availability of the convention center,” Bryant says. “A number of hotels have been very generous in donating rooms for the authors; they’re available in this window but probably not into the summer. In the summer, we’d be competing with too many other events here. We don’t want to do that.”
F UNDR A ISING
Organizers are working on securing nonprofit status for the festival, a time-consuming process, Bryant says. “Because the IRS had been so understaffed, I think there is still a lot of backlog,” he says. “But we have ideas that we can keep building on as we hope to reach sustainability.”