Archive of Lectures
2021 - Joy Harjo
For the tenth annual Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture on the Literature of the Southwest, the UNM English Department hosted and welcomed back US Poet Laureate and UNM English alumna, Joy Harjo, who is an award-winning writer, performer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. Her numerous publications include nine books of poetry, a memoir, a young adult novel, a children’s book, and six CDs featuring her poetry and music. Harjo was the first Native American poet to be named and honored as US Poet Laureate for three consecutive terms. Harjo's other prestigious awards include the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN US Literary Award for Nonfiction, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Harjo is Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, Chair of the Board of Directors for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. The tenth annual lecture was the first since Rudolfo Anaya’s unfortunate passing in 2020. View the recording of the lecture here.
2019 - Lourdes Alberto; Jason Aesnap, Tristan Ahtone, Shaun Beyale; Jennifer Denetdale
The UNM English Department hosted a series of symposia. The first lecture, “Trauma and Kinship: Mesoamerica in the Poetry of Ana Castillo and Natalie Diaz" was delivered by Dr. Lourdes Alberto, a Zapotec indigenous scholar and Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. The second symposium, “New Approaches, New Genres: Indigenous Voices Now,” featured Jason Asenap, a Comanche and Muscogee Creek writer, director, and occasional actor based in Albuquerque, NM. Dr. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Professor of American Studies at UNM and Director of the Institute for American Indian Research delivered the third lecture, “Indigenous Feminisms and the Futures of Native America."
2018 – Hector Armienta
Héctor Armienta is a distinguished composer, librettist, and pianist, and his work has been performed throughout the United States, in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Barcelona, Spain. He is the artistic director of Opera Cultura, the only Latino-focused opera company in the United States. His work explores the Mexican and Mexican American cultural experience, and it draws on and reinvents Western and indigenous traditions. His newest opera, Bless Me, Ultima, is based on Rudolfo Anaya’s world-renowned novel and had its world premiere at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
2017 - Nora Naranjo Morse
Nora Naranjo Morse is an internationally known sculptor, poet, filmmaker and producer of films on Pueblo life and culture. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Heard Museum, the Smithsonian, and at the National Museum of the American Indian, where her hand-built sculpture piece, Always Becoming, was selected from more than 55 entries submitted by Native artists as the winner of an outdoor sculpture competition in 2005. She is the author of the poetry collection Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay (1992), which combines poems with photographs of her clay figures.
2016 - Rigoberto González
Rigoberto González is the author of fourteen books, including four books of poetry; ten books of fiction, including a novel (Crossing Vines 2003); a collection of short stories (Men Without Bliss 2008); two bilingual children’s books; a series of young adult novels; and three books of nonfiction. His first poetry collection, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks (1999), was a National Poetry Series selection, and his first memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006) won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
2015 - Anne Hillerman
Anne Hillerman is the author of 8 published non-fiction books and has worked as an editorial page editor, arts editor, and food critic for the Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe New Mexican. Anne Hillerman’s first novel, Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013), made the New York Times bestseller list and received the 2014 Spur Award for the Best First Mystery from Western Writers of America. The book also received 2 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards for Best Book and Best Mystery of 2014. She recently published a second mystery novel, Rock With Wings (2015), and is currently working on a third.
2014 - Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo is one of the leading figures in Chicana and contemporary literature. A celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar, Castillo is the author of the novels So Far From God and Sapogonia, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, as well as The Guardians, Peel My Love like an Onion, and many other books of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her most recent novel is Give it to Me, and the 20th anniversary edition of her groundbreaking book The Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma will be published this October by the University of New Mexico Press.
2013 - N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday is one of the most distinguished writers of our time. His first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, an event that brought new visibility to American Indian literature and literature of the Southwest, a landscape that has inflected his fiction, poetry, and paintings for decades.
2012 - John Nichols
John Nichols is the author of twelve novels and eight works of non-fiction. His most recent novel, On Top of Spoon Mountain, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in October 2012. Nichols has written the "New Mexico Trilogy" of novels—his classic The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, and The Nirvana Blues— as well as a non–fiction trilogy about the Southwest—If Mountains Die, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, and On the Mesa. Three of Nichols’s novels have been adapted into films: The Sterile Cuckoo, The Milagro Beanfield War, and The Wizard of Loneliness.
2011 - Denise Chavez
A native of Las Cruces who lives in the house where she was born, Chávez is the author of plays, short fiction, essays, and novels, including The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), Face of an Angel (1994), Loving Pedro Infante (2001), and A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture (2006). Widely regarded as a foundational figure in Mexican American literature, Chávez has won numerous awards for her work, including the American Book Award, the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, the New Mexico Governor’s Award, and the Premio Aztlán, a literary prize for Chicana/o literature established by Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya.
2010 - Simon Ortiz
An internationally renowned writer, the Acoma Pueblo [poet] and scholar Simon J. Ortiz is widely regarded as a foundational figure in Indigenous literature. Ortiz is the author of 15 books including Going for the Rain (1976), Woven Stone (1992), Men on the Moon (1999), and From Sand Creek (2000), plus the collection A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 1680–1980, co–edited with longtime friend Rudolfo Anaya. Ortiz’s work focuses on the decolonization of Indigenous lands, cultures, and communities and the place of Indigenous story in the canon of world literature.
