Ackerman, Diane (1948- )
Ackerman's memoir The Twilight of the Tenderfoot is set on a New Mexico ranch.
Baca, Jimmy Santiago (1952- )
Baca is a poet and New Mexico native. His memoir is A Place to Stand: The Making of Poet.
Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin J.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2006) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the controversial and renowned physicist including his pivotal role in developing nuclear weapons and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Hendricks, Rick
Pablo Abeita: The Life and Times of a Native Statesman of Isleta Pueblo, 1871-1940 recounts, for the first time, the life and influence of one of the Southwest's most important native leaders in his time.
Nez, Chester with Judith Schiess Avila
In Code Talker, Nez shares the story of his military experience as one of the original WW II code talkers situating it within his childhood raising sheep with his family on the Navajo on the reservation and his time in boarding schools.
Connors, Phillip
In Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness, Connors, former Wall Street Journal reporter and writer for Harper's Magazine and The Guardian, writes about his experiences as a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest, a job that he first held in 2002 and for which he returns to New Mexico from Texas most summers.
Gomez, Laura
Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American (2007 & 2018) is a seminal book on the history of Northern New Mexico around the time of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Gomez makes a significant case that links the construction and increasing importance of racial identity in American society to that time.
Hendricks, Richard
Hendricks is a New Mexico scholar, former state historian and current state records administrator. He writes on a variety of historical topics related to New Mexico and the Southwest. Important works co-authored by Hendricks include the Vargas Project: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, 1694-1697 (2002) and The Witches of Abiquiu: The Governor, the Priest, the Genizaro Indians and the Devil (2006).
Hernandez, Kelly Lytle
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands (2022) tells the story of the Mexican magonista movement which sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
Hoglund, Don (1952-2022)
Hoglund was a veterinarian in Santa Fe and Texas who worked with the state of New Mexico to help in the removal of a threatened wild horse population in White Sands. Nobody's Horses: The Dramatic Rescue of the Wild Herd of White Sands is an account of that work.
Kessel, John (1936- )
Historian John Kessel focuses on the Spanish Colonial history of New Mexico in his many books and articles. He worked as both a professor at UNM and resident historian at several National Park Service sites. Kiva, Cross and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540-1840 (1979) and Miera Y Pacheco: A Renaissance Spaniard in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico (2015) are two of his most notable works.
Poling-Kempes, Lesley (1954- )
Ladies of the Canyon: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest (2015) is the true story of three Victorian women who changed and were changed by their travels in the desert southwest. Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West (1989) is the story of the waitresses at Fred Harvey’s restaurants along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway from the 1880s through the 1950s.
Sides, Hampton (1962- )
Sides 1986 work of narrative nonfiction, Blood and Thunder, tells the story U.S. Army's conquest of the American West. He recounts the details of Kit Carson's involvement in "resettling" the Navajo from their lands in New Mexico and Arizona. Sides is an editor at Outside magazine, based in Santa Fe, and was a 2015 Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute.
