Who We Are

Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli received her MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware in 1968. After a few years teaching freshman English at Northern Virginia Community College, she moved to New York and began her career in publishing in the Contracts Department of New American Library (NAL) in 1971. Then, following a brief stint as an editor at Fawcett Publications, she and then-husband Jim Trupin founded JET Literary Associates, Inc. in New York City in 1975. As of 2002, their offices relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico (Liz’s office) and Vienna, Austria (Jim’s office). JET has had great success in the mystery/suspense market, including award-winning writers Robert Campbell, Harry Whittington, Charles Willeford, Beverly Bird, John Fortunato, Anne Hillerman, and, most recently, with D.M. Rowell, whose Never Name the Dead was nominated for the 2023 Mary Higgins Clark Award by the Mystery Writers of America. In November 2021, Liz proudly celebrated her 50^th year in publishing and is happy to be still going strong.

Cynthia Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines. She received the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference. She graduated from the University of New Mexico and received her MFA in creative writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Sylvester’s debut book, The Half-White Album, was published by the University of New Mexico Press as part of the Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series. The Half-White Album won the best LGBTQ+ book in the 2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. She’s currently working on a novel and a collection of fiction and creative non-fiction.

Cynthia hosts Albuquerque DimeStories—3-minute stories written and read by the author. Hosting DimeStories is a way to give back and foster a writing community. A community of writers is at the core of what she attributes to her success, endurance, and joy in writing. Writing is a solitary endeavor. “So much of what we writers write never sees the light of day.” A Dime Story, fiction or non-fiction, is a way to have an achievable goal each month (about 500 words) and provides a venue to read the work to a receptive audience. Having a community of writers is essential because Cynthia, like many writers, works a “9 to 5.” Her profession for over thirty years has been physical therapy. She comes from a line of “medicine women.” Her mother and aunts were nurses, and she and her sister have health professions. Cynthia’s career in medicine is often reflected in her work as a writer. She is a member of a critique group of alumni from her MFA program and a member of a local generative group. When not working as a writer or a home health PT, Cynthia loves to box, garden (or pull weeds), take walks with her wife and their dog, Zeus, hang out with friends and family, and talk about writing, TV shows, movies, books, sports, what happened last week or last year or before she was born—whatever, she’s enjoying herself if there is a story involved. (And it’s all one long story.)

Deborah Taffa’s book, Whiskey Tender (HarperCollins) has been named to several “best” lists at Oprah Daily, ELLE, The NY Times, The Washington Post, and Esquire. With fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, and the NY State Summer Writer’s Institute, Deborah received her MFA from the NWP at the University of Iowa. A citizen of the Kwatsaan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, she is the director of the MFA CW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Huff Post, PBS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other outlets.

Deborah was a 2023 NMW grantee.

With thirty years of experience in the entertainment industry, Golding is a produced screenplay writer, a director of two feature films and is also a published writer of short stories and poems. He holds an M.A. in creative writing and also a Ph.D. in creative and critical writing. He has produced a number of short films and a documentary that he sold worldwide. His films have won numerous festival awards and his screenplays have placed as finalists in a number of the top competitions. Golding has been an artist-in-residence at various American schools and universities and has taught production, creative writing and screenwriting classes at university level in the U.S. and the U.K. He has also been commissioned to write by actors / producers such as Stephen Baldwin, Brian Krause, Kent Walwin, Paul Lupi and Alex D’Andrea. Golding remains active in the film industry both in the creative development and production sectors of the business.

For further information and press on Justin Golding go to: justingolding.com

Golding is represented by Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli of JET Literary Associates.

Priyanka Kumar is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist, filmmaker, and the author of Conversations with Birds, praised as “a landmark book” that “could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls” (Psychology Today). Conversations with Birds was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal and the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for a book that makes a significant contribution to our literary culture. Her new nonfiction book, The Light Between Apple Trees is forthcoming. Her feature documentary, The Song of the Little Road, is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Kumar’s essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, High Country News, and Orion. Her work has been featured on CBS News Radio, Yale Climate Connections, Oprah Daily, NPR, and PBS. She is a recipient of a Playa Residency, an Aldo & Estella Leopold Residency, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Literary Award, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.