New Mexico Writers Annual Dinner
2025 Dinner Registration - Get Your Tickets!
The next New Mexico Writers Annual Dinner will be held the evening of April 17, 2025 at La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe. The dinner brings established and aspiring writers together to celebrate and inspire each other and serves to celebrate each year’s grant recipients. We hope you’ll join us at the 2025 dinner!
Sustaining Members of NM Writers get a 10% discount on their dinner ticket purchase through March 31, 2025. The discount code and instructions for applying the code to your ticket purchase was sent to active members in January. New and renewing members will receive the discount code via email.
Become a Sustaining Member or Renew your Membership
We also continue to operate a program that provides reduced-price admission to writers who may need financial support to attend. You may add a donation “So Others May Attend” when you purchase your dinner tickets. Please contact us if you would like to be considered for a reduced-price ticket to the dinner.
Dinner Speakers
Noted Indigenous Screenwriter, Producer, Director Billy Luther to Headline 2025 New Mexico 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.
At the dinner, Billy Luther will be featured in conversation with fiction writer and poet Cynthia J. Sylvester. Sylvester, a member of the NMW Board of Directors, was born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné Nation. In addition to her book The Half-White Album, her work has appeared in ABQ in Print, Leon Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, As Us Journal, and Bosque—The Magazine, among others. She was the recipient of the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference.
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.
