New Mexico Writers Annual Dinner

Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan will headline the 2026 NM Writers Annual Dinner at La Fonda on the Plaza on April 30.

Givhan’s latest novel, Salt Bones (Mulholland/Little, Brown, 2025), recently appeared on Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2025 list in the Mystery/Thriller category. Two of Givhan’s earlier novels—Trinity Sight and Jubilee—were finalists for the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards, and Trinity Sight received the 2020 Southwest Book Award. She is also the author of five poetry collections, including Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press, 2022).

Her honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, and the Frost Place Latinx Scholarship. She was the 2024 Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico.

Givhan’s family comes from the Indigenous peoples of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico including Ysleta del Sur, the Tigua Indian peoples of the Ysleta region of El Paso, and the Huichol of Nayarit. Givhan lives and writes in Albuquerque.

The dinner keynote will again be styled as an interview. Givhan will be in conversation with NM Writers Board Member Cynthia J. Sylvester, who is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. Sylvester’s work has appeared in ABQ in Print, Leon Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, As Us Journal, and Bosque (The Magazine), among other publications. Her first novel The Half White Album was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2023 and received the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for best LGBTQ+ book.

Noted Indigenous Screenwriter, Producer, Director Billy Luther headlined at the 2025 NM Writers Annual Dinner at La Fonda on the Plaza on April 17.

Luther (Diné, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo) has made several documentaries and short films but is best known for his 2023 award-winning feature film Frybread Face and Me. This coming-of-age tale draws upon Luther’s own story of spending his formative years in San Diego and being uprooted to spend one summer with his grandmother on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. While there, he is forced to navigate the conflict between his interest in pop culture and Native traditions that had never been part of his experience. 

Luther’s 2007 feature documentary, Miss Navajo, follows the journey of a beauty pageant contestant on her quest to be crowned Miss Navajo Nation. The film premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival before being aired nationally on PBS. Luther’s second documentary feature, Grab, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was screened at more than 80 film festivals around the world. In 2016, his documentary Red Lake premiered at the LA Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the International Documentary Association Awards. Currently, Luther is a writer and director for the award-winning AMC series Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn and Chee novels by acclaimed New Mexico author Tony Hillerman and filmed in New Mexico.

Only a few days after Hampton Sides’s newest book arrived in stores, the New York Times bestselling author was featured in conversation with poet and TV host Hakim Bellamy at the 6th Annual New Mexico Writers Dinner on April 25, 2024.

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook is an epic account of a momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day. Cook’s last journey in 1776 both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the eighteenth century. At once a ferociously paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, The Wide Wide Sea is already one of the most anticipated books of 2024.