the 9th annual
Taos Writers Conference
Sponsored by SOMOS, Taos, NM
Early Bird Registration by end of day 6/28/25:
All workshops (except for the ones designated online via Zoom) are located at SOMOS, 108 Civic Plaza Dr, Taos, NM 87571, unless otherwise specified.
Early Bird Registration by end of day 6/28/25:
Registration closes 7/23/25
Faculty
Nick Flynn
Keynote Speaker
Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.
Connie Josefs
Sean Murphy
Sean W. Murphy is the recipient of a 2018 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. The latest edition of his book One Bird, One Stone, a nonfiction chronicle of Zen meditation practice in America (Hampton Roads 2013), won the 2014 International Book Award in the Eastern Religions category. His novel The Time of New Weather was named Best Novel in the National Press Women’s Communication Awards, and his debut, The Hope Valley Hubcap King, won the Hemingway Award for a First Novel. (All Bantam-Dell books). His novel-in-process, Wilson’s Way, won the 2017 William Faulkner Wisdom Award for a novel-in-progress. In 2019 he was co-winner of the Mary C. Mohr prize in Creative Nonfiction from Southern Indiana University and in 2020 won the New Millenium Award for Flash Fiction. An authorized Zen meditation teacher and lineage holder, he taught for many years with Natalie Goldberg (author of Writing Down the Bones) in her series of writing and meditation seminars. He has taught classes in meditation, creative writing, and literature for the University of New Mexico-Taos for 25 years, and a variety of other venues. His yearly Write to the Finish Course, taught with his wife Tania Casselle, who is also an author, has helped hundreds of writers finish book-length projects. See his website at www.murphyzen.com
Minrose Gwin
Minrose Gwin is the award-winning author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was a coeditor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal.
Like the characters in her novel Promise, Minrose Gwin was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, and three winsome four-leggeds.
For more information about Minrose’s memoir and novels, see minrosegwin.com.
Contact information: mgwin@email.unc.edu
Susannah Simpson
Susannah Simpson‘s work has been published in: North American Review, Potomac, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum, South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM, Xavier Review among others. Simpson’s work was selected twice to be read at the Norton Museum, she was a 2023 Featured Reader for Miami’s SWWIM/Betsy Hotel’s Reading Series and her poems have been included in several anthologies. Her book: Geography of Love & Exile was published by Cervena Barva Press. She is Founder & Co-Director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches. Simpson holds an MFA in Writing Literature from Bennington, a PhD from Binghamton University, has a Certificate of Advanced Study in Therapeutic Writing and currently facilitates WriteRECOVERY groups in treatment centers. Her next collection, Dharma of Death & Desire, has been accepted for publication by Shanti Arts Press. Her recent book, Mother Wind, has been accepted by Pines Row Press for publication in late fall 2024.
Allegra Huston
Allegra Huston is the co-author of the book Write What You Don’t Know, based on the Imaginative Storm method which she developed in collaboration with poet and creativity coach James Navé. She has published four other books: Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, the novel A Stolen Summer, How to Edit and Be Edited, and How to Read for an Audience (with James Navé). She has taught memoir, screenwriting, and creative writing workshops around the world, including for the University of Oklahoma, the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the UK’s prestigious Arvon Foundation.
She recently completed a Teachable course also titled Write What You Don’t Know, and is currently working on a book and course on how to write a memoir.
Interview with Allegra Huston: “Memoir: Write What You Don’t Know”
Sawnie Morris
Sawnie Morris is winner of the 2015 New Issues Poetry Prize for her collection of poems titled, Her, Infinite, (judge: Major Jackson). Her new manuscript has been a finalist for two national awards: the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press Prize (judge: John Yau) and (1st runner-up) for the 2022 Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award for “Artistic Merit and Excellence for a book of poems contributing in an innovative and distinct way to American poetry.” She has been honored with the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and been a co-winner of the New Mexico Book Award for her chapbook in The Sound A Raven Makes (Tres Chicas Books, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, (Wesleyan University Press online edition), and in Tupelo Quarterly, Poetry, Lana Turner: Journal of Poetry & Opinion, Plume, Puerto del Sol, Pool, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, www.drunkenboat.com, the Harvard Review anthology, Renga for Obama, El Palacio, and other magazines. Her writing about poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Boston Review. Other prose works, regarding civil rights, won a Texas Pen Literary Award and an ACLU Award. Sawnie is former co-editor of The Taos Review and was a guest Book Review and Essay Editor and frequent contributor to Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art. She has taught extensively at the undergraduate and graduate levels through the University of New Mexico and Southern Methodist University, and currently offers poetry writing workshops, as well as individual mentorship programs, online and in-person, in Ranchos de Taos. Sawnie is a co-founder of Amigos Bravos: Because Water Matters, a 35 year old non-profit advocacy organization for New Mexico’s waters. She served as the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Taos in 2018-2019.
Early Bird Registration ends 6/28/25. All registration closes on 7/23/25.
PLEASE NOTE OUR CANCELLATION POLICY: 100% refund minus a $35 administrative fee for cancellations dated 6/28/25 or earlier; 50% refund minus a $35 administrative fee for cancellations received between 6/29/25 – 7/23/25. No refunds given for cancellations received after 7/23/25.
Open Tues-Sat 12pm-4pm 575.758.0081 108 Civic Plaza Drive
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 3225, Taos, NM 87571
THANK YOU TO OUR FUNDERS
SOMOS programs are made possible in part by these organizations: New Mexico Arts, a Division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts • Taos Community Foundation • The McCune Foundation • The National Endowment For The Arts • The Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation • Taos County Lodgers Tax • TaosNetLLC for high speed internet service • LANL (Los Alamos National Labs) • New Mexico Humanities Council • Nusenda Foundation • Witter Bynner Foundation • Amazon Literary Partnership • Literary Emergency Fund