Taos Writers Showcase

For two decades, SOMOS sponsored a successful six- to eight-week Winter & Summer Writers Series, which highlighted local, regional, and occasional national writers and poets. In the fall of 2017, we decided to change the series to quarterly and recruit only nationally and internationally known writers and poets. Since our move to Civic Plaza Drive, with its enlarged space, we have begun hosting ongoing readings from both local and regional writers. Our shift to a quarterly Writers Showcase brings authors—many of whom we hadn’t been able to attract in the past—to Taos for both readings and workshops.

To inaugurate the series, we presented best-selling author Tommy Orange on January 5, 2018, to a sold-out audience; he read from his as-yet-unpublished There, There. In April, we collaborated with the Taos Jazz Bebop Society to host Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tyehimba Jess, accompanied by the John Rangel Trio. Our keynote speaker for the second annual Taos Writers Conference was novelist, essayist, and memoirist Kate Christensen, and we completed our series with a reading and workshop by Naomi Shihab Nye in the fall of 2018.

In 2019, we started off the series with Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires. We followed in April with award-winning poet Jamaal May (Hum). In May, we featured Mexican-American author Francisco Cantú, whose book The Line Becomes a River reflects on his four years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent. His presentation addressed border and immigration issues in collaboration with two local advocacy groups, Taos United and Taos Immigrant Allies. Arthur Sze was the keynote speaker for the third annual Taos Writers Conference, in July 2019.

The first Writers Showcase author of 2020 was Chigozie Obioma, winner of the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for Debut Literary Work, and the LA Times prize for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize 2015. Obioma read at the Harwood Museum of Art on February 14, 2020.

The last writer on our 2020 Writers Showcase schedule was biographer and nonfiction writer, Holly George-Warren, reading from her most recent publication on Janis Joplin, Janis:  Her Life and Music.

In 2021 we invited poet Ada Limón for Poetry Month, Luci Tapahonso to be the keynote speaker for our 5th Annual Taos Writers Conference, and presented E.J. Levy, author of Love In Theory and The Cape Doctor for Prose month in November.

Showcase writers for 2022 include Kirk Wallace Johnson, Camille Dungy, Ana Castillo, Luis Alberto Urrea, Lan Samantha Chang, and Steve Almond. Showcase writers for 2024 featured Paul Tran, Ramona Emerson, Two Worlds Performance Group presentation “Spider Woman Stories,” and Kinari Webb. 2024 brought Martin Espada, Laura Jacobs, Allison Hedge Coke, and Dr. Ray Christian. Planned wrtiers for 2025 are Rachel Coventry (from Galway, Ireland), Stevie Czerniel, Nick Flynn, and Levi Romero.

 

Upcoming Writers

Rachel Coventry

Rachel Coventry

Poet from Galway, Ireland, April 25, 5:30pm

Rachel Coventry lives in Galway. She holds a PhD in Heidegger’s poetics from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her poems have appeared in various journals including The North, The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, Stand, Southword, The Irish Times, and The SHop. She won the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust Annual Poetry Competition in 2016 and has been short-listed for many other competitions including The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize. Her debut collection Afternoon Drinking in the Jolly Butchers (2018) is published by Salmon Poetry and her second collection, Detachable Heart, was published in 2022 (Salmon Poetry).

Stevie Czerniel

Stevie Czerniel

June '25 TBD

Stevie Elyse Czerniel, was born as Steven John August 10 th 1957 and raised in Los Angeles. In 1965 at eight-years-old he felt female inside but vowed to keep it secret. He lived as a male, but escaped to his real life as a girl when he was alone.
Over 30 years, Steve rose to senior VP at BBDO Advertising in San Francisco but always endured the pain of gender dysphoria alone. In 2021 after six decades of inner conflict and hidden outbursts of suicidal rage, Steven finally revealed herself as Stevie Elyse. Today Stevie lives happily as a transgender person in Taos New Mexico. What began as writing lessons with Catherine Strisik two years ago, has blossomed into a creative partnership of writing styles
determined to tell Stevie’s story.

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn

July 25, 5:30pm

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.

Levi Romero

Levi Romero

Hispanic Heritage Month Speaker, TBD

Levi Romero was selected as the inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate in 2020. His most recent book is the co-edited anthology, Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland. His two collections of poetry are A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works and In the Gathering of Silence. He is co-author of Sagrado: A Photopoetics Across the Chicano Homeland. His co-edited, New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, is forthcoming from Museum of New Mexico Press, 2023. He has served as co-editor on various journals and anthologies, including Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest. His poems and book publications have received numerous awards, including two 2017 Society for Humanistic Anthropology Poetry Award Honorable Mentions, a 2015 International Latino Book Awards, 2014-2015 Southwest Book Award, New Mexico Arizona Book Award, Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, Finalist, and a Best Books of the Southwest. He is also the recipient of several NEA and NEH grant awards, including a Research and Creative Works Leadership Award. He was awarded the post of New Mexico Centennial Poet in 2012. Romero is a bilingual poet whose language is immersed in the regional manito dialect of northern New Mexico. His work has been published throughout the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Cuba. His poem writing exercise, “Where I’m From, De dónde yo soy,” based on the original poem, Where I’m From, by George Ella Lyon, was published by Scholastic as part of a nationwide educational project and has been used extensively, nationally and internationally. He has taught writing workshops for schools, universities, incarcerated populations, libraries, community centers, writers’ organizations, private mentorships, and has also collaborated with community libraries on various ethno-poetry and oral history documentation projects. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies and on-line publications. He is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. He has co-directed two films on acequia culture. Bendición del agua, a short film, premiered at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and Going Home Homeless won a People’s Choice Award at the Taos Shortz Film Festival. Romero is from the Embudo Valley of northern New Mexico.He is an Associate Professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies department at the University of New Mexico where he directs the New Mexico Cultural Landscapes Certificate program and the Digital Cuentos project. 

Past Writers

Dr. Ray Christian

Dr. Ray Christian

2024 Storytelling Festival

Ray’s stories have appeared in Readers Digest’s  Best Stories in America (2016) and  American Hero’s (2017) editions. He was selected as the 2017 Serenbe France Focus Storytelling Fellow (Atlanta, GA) and his stories have been featured on NPR radio shows such as The Moth Radio Hour, Snap Judgment, and Backstory as well as the Risk podcast, among many others.  As a competitive storyteller, Ray is a ten-time Moth Story Slam Champion, and winner of the 2016 National Storytelling Festival Story Slam. Sharing his stories across the US and Canada, Ray has made several appearances on Moth Mainstage, The National Storytelling Festival Exchange Place (2019) , and was part of the 2018 tour of Snap Judgment Live!

In 2018, Ray has been named as the best known story teller in the south by Bitter Southerner magazine. Glynn Washington, host and producer of Snap Judgement, calls him “a storyteller’s storyteller.”  He is distinguished for his exceptional accomplishments as a performer and spoken word performer and his training and experience as an educator and motivator.

Ray is currently the producer and host of What’s Ray Saying, a podcast that utilizes history , storytelling and commentary to provide a unique perspective on the African American cultural experience.

Allison Adele Hedgecoke

Allison Adele Hedgecoke

2024 Writers Conference Keynote Speaker

Allison’s most recent honors include 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a 2022 National Book Award Finalist, a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist, an ASLE Book of the Year Finalist, and won the 2022-2023 Emory Elliott Book Award. In 2021, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters  and awarded the 2021 AWP George Garrett Award from AWP. Hedge Coke was selected for an inaugural Legacy Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council (2021-2022), and recently awarded the UCR Dean’s Mellon Professorship (2022-2023). An American Book Award winning author and 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow, she has written or edited 18 books and is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing for the University of California Riverside, where she directs UCR Writers Week Festival, directs the Medical Health and Humanities Designated Emphasis in the School of Medicine, where she teaches Death and Dying and Narrative Medicine,  and is affiliated faculty for the newUCR  department of Society, Health Equity, and Sustainability. Her eighth authored book is Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, 2022) and tenth edited book is Effigies III.
Laura Jacobs

Laura Jacobs

2024 Writers Showcase

Reading from Surviving TransphobiaI in celebration of National LGTBQ+ Month on Sunday, 6/9, at 4pm at the SOMOS Salon.

She is a psychotherapist, activist, public speaker, and author devoted to the exploration of identity and the relationship between individual and society, the diversity of gender identity and sexual expression, and the search for meaning. Jacobs is the editor of Surviving Transphobia: Transgender and Nonbinary Experts on Endurance 

An anthology of transgender and gender nonbinary leaders and role models writing on their own experiences of transphobia, their suffering, and strategies for endurance so that members of the community can grow from understanding the private lives and struggles of those in the public eye. These authors also share their reflections on the current climate of politicized, weaponized transphobia.

Recent years have been agonizing, most especially for those of us who might be role models.  After each new assault on trans lives, we model confidence when we are equally traumatized ourselves, we assert our community’s ability to thrive when we are sometimes just as uncertain as our audiences.  How do we balance our internal distresses with our visibility to the public eye?  How do we demonstrate strength each time there is a new anti-trans proclamation?  How do we persevere in our own lives?  And how can we use our stories to teach endurance to others trans and gender nonbinary themselves?

Martín Espada

Martín Espada

2024 Writers Showcase Author

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new book of poems from Norton is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump(2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Ramona Emerson

Ramona Emerson

2023 Taos Writers Conference Keynote Speaker

Friday, 7/7/23 (Taos Writers Conference)

Ramona Emerson is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She has a bachelor’s in Media Arts from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her husband, the producer Kelly Byars, run their production company Reel Indian Pictures. Shutter is her first novel.

 

Loida Maritza Pérez

Loida Maritza Pérez

2023 Writers Showcase Author

Saturday, 8/19/23

A native of the Dominican Republic, a 2022-2023 National Leaders of Color Fellow, and a 2023 WESTAF BIPOC Artist Fund Awardee Loida Maritza Pérez is an independent scholar, cultural activist and author of Geographies of Home, a novel published in the United States and abroad. Her upcoming book, Beyond the Pale, won a PEN America 2019 Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History. Her most recent publication focuses on themes of immigration. She will present a reading and offer a Q&A. This is a free event.

 

Kim Delfina Gleason

Kim Delfina Gleason

Artistic Director, Two Worlds: Native Theater & Performing Arts

Saturday, 10/14/23 (Taos Storytelling Festival)

Two Worlds is dedicated to the craft of performing arts expressing the duality of the contemporary American Indian through drama, comedy and storytelling. Two Worlds is on a mission to empower Native communities through performance art that is of, by, and for Native Americans.

 

Kinari Webb

Kinari Webb

2023 Writers Showcase Author

Friday & Saturday, 11/3/23 – 11/4/23

Kinari Webb is an American physician who founded Health in Harmony in 2005 to support her work in Indonesia after studying orangutans at Gunung Palung National Park. Dr. Webb graduated from Yale University School of Medicine with honors. Her book Guardians of the Trees was published in 2021.

 

Paul Tran

Paul Tran

2023 Writers Showcase Author

Friday & Saturday, 4/14/23-4/15/23

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, from Penguin in the US and the UK. They are a Visiting Faculty in Poetry at Pacific University MFA in Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

 

Steve Almond

Steve Almond

2022 Writers Showcase Author

Friday & Saturday, 11/11/22-11/12/22

Steve Almond is the author of a dozen books, including the New York Times Bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His new novel, All the Secrets of the World, has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox. He teaches at Harvard and Wesleyan.

 

Carmen Agra Deedy

Carmen Agra Deedy

2022 Writers Showcase Author

Thursday & Saturday, 10/13/22-10/15/22

Carmen Agra Deedy is the author of twelve books for children and her personal stories first appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered. She is host of the four-time Emmy-winning children’s program, Love That Book!

 

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang

2022 Writers Showcase Author

Friday & Saturday, 10/7/22-10/8/22

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the story collection Hunger and three novels. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Samantha teaches at and directs Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
 

Ana Castillo

Ana Castillo

2022 Writers Showcase Author

Keynote Speaker, 6th Annual Taos Writer’s Conference
Friday, 7/29/22 at 7pm MT

Ana Castillo has received a 1987 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and the Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.

 


















































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

A group of women reading as part of the SOMOS writers showcase