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Articles by Amy Boaz
Calling all Jewish poets
“Notions of formation and connection — exploring the past, present and future of Jewish poetry — are essential to our mission,” explain the founders of Yetzirah on what the Hebrew word means. In Jewish mystical traditions, Yetzirah is the act of making or creating, just as God “spoke” the world into being.
Unconventionally beautiful: The Taos portraits of Donald Graham
A tiny photograph of a serene lady seated in a wheelchair serves as the dedication to photographer Donald Graham’s compilation of otherwise outsized black-and-white portraits, “One of a Kind,” published in 2021. It is a photo of his mother. Restricted by severe illness, she is depicted as a dignified figure in a high-necked dress, arms composed and a slight, enigmatic smile on her lips.
Loss of innocence: New novel takes on the late-1960s counterculture
“God’s Still Waiting at the Altar” by Allen Ferguson Better World Publishing (2026, 378 pp.) A photo of two teenagers at a fall dance in suburban Ohio, 1963. In their faces, “a look of hopefulness, confidence and belief. …[when] things in America were pretty much as they should be and would always be. People had not only food and shelter, transportation and clothing, but also steaks and two-story houses, new eight-cylinder Oldsmobiles, button-down shirts and permanently pressed slacks.
What glaciers mean to us: Leopold Writing fellow Sarah Hines discusses the relationship between water and mountains
“People’s connections to mountains and glaciers are, at heart, about water,” Boston-bred Fulbright scholar and author Sarah Hines explains about her academic passion. While doing her doctoral research on the history of social struggle and compromises over water access in the Bolivian Andes, she became deeply attuned to people’s relationships with mountains and glaciers, from the beginning of human settlement to the present.
Arts festival at the Wurlitzer Foundation
The mission of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico has been simple and enduring: Support the artist and the creative process. Founded in 1954 by the German American pianist and philanthropist Helene Wurlitzer, the foundation provides residencies for emerging and established artists from around the world. An all-day arts festival and alumni auction takes place this Saturday (July 11) on the main HWF campus, at the intersection of Los Pandos Road and Birch Street.
Heroes and villains: New history explores unlikely political alliance between Taos artists and the Pueblo
“Beating Heart of the World: The Taos Art Colony, the Pueblo Resistance and the Battle for Indigenous America” By Steven L. Davis High Road / University of New Mexico Press (2026, 327 pp.) “How could a tribe of some 400 souls hope to stave off a rapidly expanding nation of 76 million people?” By the turn of the 20th century, the Taos Pueblo people were “holdouts” in the brutal struggle against Native extermination by the dominant power.
What exactly is going on here? Two new novels struggle to express the ineffable
“No One Dreams in Color” By John Biscello Unsolicited Press (2026, 411 pp.) The disappearance of a filmmaker is the intriguing point of departure in this literary mystery. Paul Kirby disappears seven years after making his one very short film, “Wendigo,” which has become a kind of cult classic. The film explores memory and loss and had an outsized effect on then-19-year-old narrator, Andrew DiBenedetto, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “‘Wendigo’ had tattooed itself on my heart.
Powerful voices proclaim: Santa Fe International Literary Festival happens this weekend
“Each festival tends to take on a life of its own and this year seems to be about the power of individual voices,” notes Megan Mulry, the Santa Fe International Literary Festival’s executive director. “We do not curate according to any particular theme, but authors like Isabel Wilkerson, Lauren Groff, Kiese Laymon and Judy Blume are great examples of how a deeply personal narrative can transcend generations and cultures to become universal.” Powerful voices, indeed.
A cobber’s tale: How building a mud house became a way to redemption
“House Made of Ground: Wherein One May Learn to Make the Earth Their Home” by Jim Kristofic 2026, 232 pp. Stunned by the death of his small child, angry at his loss, uncomprehending of his fate, a man makes a house. “I hope I might stumble toward wisdom, toward some kind of experience worthy of my thoughts and energy.
Firm lines and sharp divisions: Debut novel takes on Agnes Martin
“I Am Agatha: A Novel” By Nancy Foley Avid Reader Press (S&S, 2026, 245 pp.) Agatha Smithson is a surly and unpleasant woman. She is physically strong and unyielding in her manner. She prefers “firm lines and sharp divisions.” She is also making a name despite herself as a brilliant and visionary artist in the early 1970s. And she is in love.
Creatures great and small
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Beauty in our roots In her new work, Taos poet makes peace with her Greek heritage
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Making history in NM: 2 new books explore notable characters rising to the occasion in trying times
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Lessons in friendship: New children’s book and publishing panel
‘The Blue Dog and the White Horse: The Best of Friends’ By Haven Lindsey, illustrated by Emily Pritchett Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Brandylane Publishers, Inc. (2025, 43 pp.) Unlikely friends become good friends, friends for life: an aging dapple grey roping horse named Max and a small, young part-blue heeler, Gracie, find each other on an Austin, Texas, ranch.
What are the birds saying? : Birdsong occupies the current Aldo and Estella Leopold Writing resident
In the only week and a half since John “Mike” Campbell has been ensconced as the current monthlong academic resident at Mi Casita — the former cottage residence of Aldo and Estella Leopold in the Carson National Forest, now the locus of the foundation’s summer writing program — he has identified over 80 bird species in the “patch” of Tres Piedras and over 60 at the casita alone located off of Route 285.
The magnificent comeback: Memoir follows an illusionist’s family back on the road
‘The Magician’s Daughter’ Wild Rising Press (2025, 224 pp.) “Oh, honey, shooting your mom from the cannon paid the bills,” came the retired magician’s habitual response to his daughter’s curiosity about his past career. The sum of illusionist Lee Grabel’s 13 years on the road with his wife, Helen (stage name Helene), was now — in mid-1970s suburban California — parked in a moldering green trailer near his real estate office.
A mountain of woes in Navajo Country: New series title from mystery maven Anne Hillerman
‘Shadow of the Solstice: A Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito Novel’ Harper/HarperCollins Publishers (2025, 326 pp.) “Leetso” is how uranium, “the monster of yellow earth,” is called by the Diné, according to novelist Anne Hillerman in her newest murder mystery. And the element mined for the U.S.’ long-running nuclear arsenal is a bad, bad word.
Literary lights in dark times
With so many arts institutions under threat this year, it's refreshing to see the return of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival 2025 with a bountiful roster of artists, writers and thinkers: Percival Everett, Heather Cox Richardson, Michael Pollan, Amy Tan, Julian Brave NoiseCat, Miranda July, Deborah Jackson Taffa and Terry Tempest Williams, to name just a few.
The Big Read at TCA
Bringing the joy of reading where we live: In Ross Gay’s slender book of poetry “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” selected as this year’s Big Read work for a community-wide spring literacy project, the poet teacher exhorts his students in one poem to revel in the offbeat and the incorrect: “Who/knows where the poem/will lead you/I tell them to let go/their reins/and listen to the tongue’s/half-wit/brilliance the corner/of the mind/made light by some/accidental yoking/of two impossibly/joined...
BECAUSE YOU ARE MINE
A melancholy novel about imperfect people loving each other imperfectly. A trans person looks back on their relationship with their mother after her disappearance. Boaz’s novel opens two weeks after George’s mother, Louise, vanished from Willow, New Mexico. In the year or so before her disappearance, George and their girlfriend, Truley, had been living with Louise in her home.
A story of faith and friendship: Willa Cather’s ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop’ at nearly 100 years
Death Comes for the Archbishop Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. (University of New Mexico Press, 2024, 236 pp., intro by Richard W.
Keeping stories alive: Long-awaited Community Storytelling Festival kicks off
“The most important stories are those that ground us in our origins, inspire us for the future and foster renewal in both our land and our relationships with one another,” according to poet Olivia Romo, a “proud Taoseña,” activist and the curator of this weekend’s chockablock Taos Storytelling Festival, in its 26th year. Over the next two days, the community will be teeming with stories, from community storytellers to professionals, and from the Hacienda Martinez to SOMOS and the TCA.
New works from local favorites
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Artist opens the door to faith
‘All My Eyes See: The Artistic Vocation of Fr. William Hart McNichols’ By Christopher Pramuk and William Hart McNichols Orbis Books (2024, 193 pp.) When Fr. Bill was born in 1949, his grandmother told his mother, “Don’t get too close to this one, he belongs to God.” William Hart McNichols heeded the call to become a Jesuit early in life.
Both visible and human
Edited by Laura A. Jacobs Jessica Kingsley Publishers (2024, 221 pp.) “We are no longer deeply in the shadows,” writes one lawyer contributor to this valuable new anthology of 16 transgender advocates. “We are living authentically, and we have a right to be here.” Legislative, judicial and physical hostility against trans people has risen since the election of 2016, threatening to undo many of the advances implemented under the Obama administration.
Time, the avenger
Next Level Rebel Press (2024, 230 pp.) There’s an etiquette to time travel. You don’t call attention to yourself. You certainly don’t mention the future or events in the future. You aren’t there to influence events, only to observe. And whatever happens, do not meet your own self in the past or future because you risk collapsing your own soul. Andrea Aragon, aka Rae, is an angry, confused 16-year-old Albuquerque kid who resents her mother for her parents’ divorce and their sad comedown in life.
Consequences upon arrival
Coffey House Press (2024, 135 pp.) “Now in coming between one desert/ And another, I recognize the edges, parting and clear.” Moving through a wrecked landscape, drought-stricken deserts of the Sonoran and Mojave, where words like “dearth” and “diminished” prevail, the narrator of this exacting collection reflects on the harsh realities of the dominant culture on the border regions.
On love and fieldwork
She Writes Press (2024, 305 pp.) The reader is going to learn more than a bit about geology and dam construction in this unique, intrepid debut novel by Albuquerque bookstore partner (Bookworks), geologist and sailor D.J. Green. A radical decision to take a job as chief foundation geologist for an official Turkish dam construction southeast of Ankara changes the direction of middle-age Will Ross’ life, as well as that of his three children.
Become a walking woman
‘Walking Gone Wild: How to Lose Your Age on the Trail’ Sage Press (BookLocker.com, 2023, 205 pp.) “We must develop a compelling vision of later life,” author Dami Roelse propounds in this guidebook for walkers, “one that does not assume a trajectory of decline after 50.” The choice is letting yourself go into the “ice-cream bucket” or returning to humans’ natural form of movement. Walking.
Three: A Taos Press titles explore the changing self
‘Little Soul and the Selves: Poems’ Three: A Taos Press (2023, 103 pp.) From birth to death, what do we do but try on coats of ourselves to figure out what fits best? Or, as Taos poet Leslie Ullman (“Library of Small Happiness”) ponders in these poems that palpate incrementally the lifetime journey of one’s “little soul,” how does it feel? “Let some clues come forward,” she suggests, “through image, through dream, through/meandering guess… ” What makes up the self?
Of fires and floods: Witnesses to the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon wildfires
‘Up From the Ashes We Rise’ A Collection of Prose and Poetry Edited by Sharon Vander Meer Las Vegas Lit Press (2023, 132 pp.) “Three knocks on the door. I was told to leave my home. That fire in the distance? They said I was now in the red zone? How could that be it was miles away….
On the slab with roller dogs and chimis: A comic book about road snacks
Gas station food, like comics, gets a bad rap, asserts the Santa Fe-based artist of this black-and-white graphic chapbook. Over the course of a short road trip outside of town, the motorcyclist narrator — depicted with googly eyes inside of a black helmet, sweat-stringy hair and jug ears — takes a break from visiting petroglyphs and Camel Rock on what must be a hot day to check out the fast food offerings at gas stations and rest stops along the route. He’s no snob, our narrator.
California drear
The District: A Novella and Seven Stories Atalaya Press (2023, 126 pp.) The district of the title novella is a 40-square-blocks basin near a large California coastal city that attracts “all those who have drifted as far west as possible looking for a better deal but finding only the ocean.” These are actors, especially extras, in the movie industry, bohemians, aged anarchists, recovering drug addicts, artists, Beats, homeless and vets who have all congregated in this desultory, strangely...
Magical dramas in the Wild West
‘The Year of the Mad Jag’ Hoopern Publishing (2023, 281 pp.) A group of thirty-something Englishmen —“a stream of overeducated trans-Atlantic yobbos and tarts” — congregate in the central Arizona outback in late-1980 to grow and smuggle some seriously potent sinsemilla — seedless cannabis.
A work in progress
Survival/Persistence/Renaissance Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Nearing the end of a troubled sixth-grade year in the mid-1950s at PS 166 in Manhattan, the young narrator is asked by the principal, standing disapprovingly beside her easel, “Why is your painting so ugly?” The student has no answer.
Celebrating ‘lo nuestro’
In its second year, taking place this weekend at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, the Santa Fe Literary Festival has added two important components to the literary mix: the word “international” to its title, as well as a very intentional thrust to embrace the local.
Letting nature be
Romancito House Media (2023, 24 pp.) A seed dreams of becoming a bright red flower — prevailing even when a spring snowstorm threatens to block out the sun and bury her. But her bright red face pokes out of the snow and attracts a little girl walking down the path.
From grieving to renewal
The Center for Literary Publishing (2023, 85 pp.) “The darker/life becomes the more you/find forms/of silence/you never/before knew existed.” Brace yourself when you embark on this stunningly stark work of poems by Tommy Archuleta, a mental health counselor for the New Mexico Corrections Department. Spells and prayers can’t keep the dead from walking at night, and wherever you go the spirit of the deceased loved one wafts and looms. Grieving for a mother shades these delicate lyrical etchings.
Write up a storm: A cracking new tutorial by Taos writing coaches
‘Write What You Don’t Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy and Flow’ By Allegra Huston and James Navé Twice 5 Miles (2022, 163 pp.) It’s the new year and we are going to write better. We really will. Lake Michigan Superior State University asserts that we have been overusing certain words like “amazing” and we will banish them from our vocabulary. We have gotten lazy and need to remember to tap into the million-or-so words in the English language — of which we use only a fraction.
Friends come in all shapes, sizes, colors
‘Desert Friends: Travels with the Pack’ By Linda Harkey, illus. by Mike Minick Archway Publishing (2022, 36 pp.) Would it surprise you to learn that animals in the wild work together with domesticated animals in times of need, as well as to be chummy? Children’s book author Linda Harkey (“Chatty the Hen Pheasant”) finds a unique angle in sharing stories about hunting dogs who encounter then befriend the very animals they are supposed to track for “the Great One,” their master.
Tabula rasa for teens
‘Remember Me’ A Novel By Estelle Laure Wednesday Books/St. Martin’s (2022, 263 pp.) What if you could cancel unpleasant memories as effortlessly as undergoing a Botox treatment for wrinkles? It is 2032 and Dr. Jeffrey Vargas’ state-of-the-art Cancel technique is taking the mountainous community of Owl Nook, New Mexico, by storm. Trying to forget a failed marriage? The devastating death of a child? How about a mother who leaves you? Or a love affair that is suffocating you?
When lightning strikes
‘Take Another Piece of My Heart: A Memoir’ By Lucy Herrman Nighthawk Press (2022, 310 pp.) “Something is happening to me,” Dirk, the alarmed husband describes to his wife over the phone. He has been skiing on the Telluride slopes with their Canadian friends. “I felt like lightning went from my throat down through me to my lower back. The pain bent me over onto my poles.
Poetry for dark times
‘Reflections Through the Convex Mirror of Time: Poems in Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War’ By E.A. Mares University of New Mexico Press (2022, 180 pp.) The Fallen Angel — known by many names such as the devil or Lucifer — looms over these poems written in commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, presented here both in English and Spanish.
Before the traditions are lost: Poet Sylvia Ernestina Vergara presents Hispanic cultural exhibit at Embudo Public Library Oct. 15
Processions, posadas, bailes, songs, feast days of the santos and other cultural ways: “Things like this create joy, and a sense of completeness,” explains poet and dancer Sylvia Ernestina Vergara, “and then you feel more ready for the days ahead.” In a special exhibit and reading she is offering to the public free on Saturday (Oct.
Moving water as a muse
‘The River You Touch: Making A Life on Moving Water’ By Chris Dombrowski Milkweed Editions (2022, 321 pp.) “To learn the language of rivers is the task of many lifetimes, more than the single one I’ve been afforded,” writes this poet and lover of Montana wild spaces.
Elvis in the house: And a tender tale of winter solstice from the viewpoint of a wee mouse
‘Long White Limousine’ By Brigitte Pauli Rising Sun Publishing (2022, 378 pp.) Elvis has never left the building, as evinced by Baz Luhrmann’s new musical film, “Elvis.” Here, in another less exuberant take, German-born author and translator Brigitte Pauli offers a fictionalized account in diary form about the rock ‘n’ roll king’s inner circle told in the voice of his watchful, admiring lead guitarist.
‘At a remarkable altitude’: D. H. Lawrence’s unfinished play is presented as part of centenary celebrations in honor of his arrival in Taos
Seized with the enthusiasm of creating “the new mystic we are bringing into the world,” the guests of Mabel Dodge Luhan gather for breakfast at her house in Taos, circa 1924. The cook hasn’t come and the group of artists has to figure out how to make coffee and slice bacon.
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