2023 SANTA FE INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL

NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black and the highly anticipated Chain-Gang All-Stars, published in April. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and Friday Black was the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for the best first book. Raised in Spring Valley, New York, he now lives in the Bronx.

HAKIM BELLAMY

Hakim Bellamy served as the inaugural poet laureate for the city of Albuquerque from 2012 to 2014 before becoming deputy director of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture. He has been a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellow, an Academy for the Love of Learning Leonard Bernstein fellow, a Western States Arts Alliance Launchpad fellow, a Santa Fe Arts Institute Food Justice fellow, and a Citizen University Civic Seminary fellow. He is also a New Mexico Strategic Leadership Institute alum. In 2012 he published his first collection of poetry, Swear, for which won the WorkingClass Studies Association Tillie Olsen Award for Literature. His seventh and latest title, Commissions y Corridos, was published in 2022. Bellamy has held adjunct faculty positions at the University of New Mexico and the Institute of American Indian Arts, has shared his work in person in at least six countries, and continues to use his art to change his communities.

SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Sandra Blakeslee spent nearly five decades at The New York Times writing about science and medicine, with a particular focus on the brain. She is the co-author of many books, including Phantoms in the Brain, Sleights of Mind, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, and On Intelligence. Blakeslee is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Templeton fellow in the study of science and religion, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She was the first journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She is co-founder of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, which just closed its doors after 25 years of nurturing young science writers.

DENISE CHÁVEZ

Denise Chávez is a fronteriza writer and activist and is owner, with her husband, photographer Daniel Zolinsky, of Casa Camino Real Bookstore in Las Cruces. She is the author of The King and Queen of Comezón, Loving Pedro Infante, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, and Face of an Angel. Her awards include the New Mexico Governor’s Award, the American Book Award, the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. Chávez is director of Libros para el Viaje/Books for the Journey, which delivers books to refugee, migrant, and asylum-seeking children and families. Currently, Chávez is co-editing, with Enrique Lamadrid, We Are Here to Represent, an anthology of works by multigenerational, multilingual writers and artists. She is also creating the Museo de La Gente/Museum of the People, a living archive, library, bookstore, and community resource center in Las Cruces.