Who We Are

JJ Amaworo Wilson is a German-born Anglo-Nigerian-American writer. His 2016 novel, Damnificados, won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Fiction, and the Prix Révélation de Traduction for the French translation, and was named a Top 10 book in “O”, the Oprah magazine. His 2021 novel, Nazaré, won the Foreword INDIES Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award.

JJ’s short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including African American Journal, Justice Journal, and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. His plays have been produced on four continents, most recently in Gaza, Palestine (2021).

Amaworo Wilson has also written over a dozen books about language and language learning, two of which won awards which saw him honored at Buckingham Palace in 2008 and 2011. He is the writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University, USA, and teaches on the MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine.

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.

Pat Hodapp, retired Director of Santa Fe Public Libraries, has over 30 years of public relations and marketing experience in non-profits and libraries. She previously served as Director of Marketing at the Denver Public Library, Head of Children’s Services at the St. Louis Public Library, and was director of several non-profits.

She was awarded the best new author by the New Mexico Book Coop in 2016 and was named the “Librarian par excellence for service to Libraries and support of writers” by New Mexico Writers in 2022.

She is the author of The Bucket List: 100 Things to do in Santa Fe, and many published short stories. She has won NM Press Women and national awards for her writing. The American Library Association has named two of her public relations projects as winner of the national John Cotton Dana Award. At the Denver Public Library, Pat coordinated the Grand Opening of the Michael Graves designed Main Library, which included internal press. She also coordinated the marketing and press for the Denver Public Library’s hosting of the White House’s international Summit of the Eight.

She was raised on a subsistence Michigan farm by crop-sharing parents who believed in education. Scholarships gave her entrance to Western Michigan University, where she earned a B.A. in English and a M.S.L.S. in Library Science.

She serves as President of the Northern New Mexico Press Women’s Chapter and on the Board of New Mexico Press Women.

Carla Chung Mattix served as an attorney for the National Park Service at the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Solicitor, from 1995 to 2021. She worked in the Washington, D.C. headquarters office and later in the San Francisco and Santa Fe offices. Carla provided legal counsel and litigation support in the areas of natural resources law, environmental law, historic and archeological preservation, intellectual property, museum collections, historic tax credits, and Native American matters. She holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Boston University, and is a member of the New Mexico, Virginia, and D.C. Bars.

Carla has lived in Santa Fe since 2005. She is also a board member of the Santa Fe Conservation Trust and enjoys exploring the beauty of the region with her husband. Carla is currently completing her first book, National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles, scheduled for publication in late Summer 2026.

Cassie McClure writes “My So-Called Millennial Life,” a nationally syndicated column through Creators Syndicate. She has been writing the column since 2016, and a book collection of her writing was published in 2023.

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 Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award finalist, a 2025 Carnegie Medal longlisted title, and a top book of the year at The Atlantic, Time, NPR, Esquire, and other outlets. A 2024 NEA Fellow, and a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant, Deborah has received fellowships from the University of Iowa and other places. She is the director of the MFACW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.

Deborah was a 2023 NMW grantee.

Joanna Hurley has spent her career in book publishing and arts marketing. During her nearly 50-year career she has worked with distinguished writers such as Nobel prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro, Pulitzer prize-winners Richard Ford and Richard Russo, as well on books about Edward Sheriff Curtis and Dorothea Lange, and with contemporary photographers such as Steve Fitch, Mark Klett, Richard Misrach, Joan Myers, and David Scheinbaum, among many others. 

Based in Santa Fe since 1994, she has been independently developing, producing, and promoting award-winning photography books with a variety of publishers since 2007. She is chair emerita of CENTER, an internationally-renowned photography organization based in Santa Fe that has supported gifted and committed photographers through awards, review programs, and seminars since 1994, and is an advisor to the Santa Fe International Literary Festival.

As a graduate student of Middle East Studies, Karima Alavi traveled to Iran to study language, history, and art. She was a History teacher at Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C., and most recently taught Humanities, Art History, and Creative Writing at the New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe. 

Karima has presented more than 100 workshops for organizations such as the Library of Congress, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery.

She has published curriculum materials for PBS, Georgetown University, and Praeger-Greenwood Publishing. Her short stories have appeared on National Public Radio (All Things Considered), in Sufi Magazine, Voices of Islam, and online journals such as the Santa Fe Writers Project, Danse Macabre, and Tom Howard Winning Writers. 

Karima completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

She lives in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where the howl of coyotes and the prowling of skunks inspire her to stay inside at night and get more writing done.

Lucy Moore is a mediator and facilitator by profession, and a writer by passion. Lucy adores New Mexico Writers. She serves as Chair of the Rising Writers Committee and is a member of the Dinner Committee. The spirit, energy, and commitment to bringing the writing community together is unique in the state and keeps her hooked!

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.

Stephen P. Hull is a career book publisher with stints at “big-5” houses Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster. He founded and ran the Boston-based independent publisher Justin, Charles & Co., and since 2009 has been a university press publisher. Since 2018 he has been a New Mexico resident and Director of the University of New Mexico Press. On the creative side, Stephen has an MA in writing from Dartmouth College, where he studied with Saul Lelchuk (Save Me From Dangerous Men), Tom Powers (The Killing of Crazy Horse; Heisenberg’s War) and screenwriter William Phillips (El Diablo; Shadow of a Doubt). He currently has a New Mexico-set thriller on submission in New York, and is working on another set in a post-Democracy America.

Tom Johnson’s 40-year career in journalism has taken him from the classroom to the newsroom and back many times. Johnson began using computers to tease meaning out of data in the early 1970s while a Ph.D. candidate studying the impact of technology on urban spaces and people. By the late 1970s, he was writing about dedicated word processing systems (think $13,000 in 1978 dollars) and covering the early stages of personal computing in Silicon Valley for TIME and Popular Science.

Johnson was a reporter for TIME Magazine in El Salvador in the mid-1980s, the start-up editor of MacWEEK magazine and, in the late ‘90s, a deputy editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Boston University’s College of Communication and lectured and conducted workshops in England, Poland, South Africa and Latin America. In 2011, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars selected him for inclusion on the Fulbright Specialists Roster as a specialist in analytic journalism.

He is Professor of Journalism (Emeritus) at San Francisco State University and the founder, co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism in Santa Fe and a former member of the national board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists, representing the four states in Region 9. He has severed as a director of the non-profit New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.  Currently, he is a director of Global Santa Fe and the Rio Grande Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Zahra Marwan, award winning writer and illustrator, works as a traditional artist with watercolor and ink. Zahra creates work that reflects her cultural roots in Kuwait as well as her life now in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her debut picture book, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky, was published by Bloomsbury Books and named one of the New York Times/New York Public Library’s 10 Best Illustrated Books as well as NPR’s Best Books of 2022. More on Zahra can be found at her website.