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we presented best-selling author Tommy Orange on January 5, 2018, to a sold-out audience; he read from his as-yet-unpublished There, There.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.