Literary Luncheon at La Quinta
Join us at La Quinta for our first Literary Luncheon of 2025 with renowned author, Deborah Taffa. Taffa, a featured author at this year’s Santa Fe International Literary Festival (May 16-18, 2025) will speak about her memoir, Whiskey Tender, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award. Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl - born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico - comes to her own interpretation of identity, reflecting on the past and present, both personal and historical. The book is a sharp and thought-provoking work laced with humor and heart.
Registration opens at 10:30 AM. The talk will begin at 11:30 AM, followed by a light 3-course lunch. A paperback copy of Whiskey Tender is included in the ticket price. Hardcover copies and additional related titles will also be available for purchase from our friends at Bookworks before and after the event.
$85 per person which includes a three-course lunch (alcohol excluded) and a paperback copy of Whiskey Tender.
Presented in collaboration with the Santa Fe International Literary Festival.
Location
La Quinta Cultural Center
Please park on the south side of the property, following the signs to the front lawn entrance.
Reserve Your Space
Additional Information
Speaker Bio
Deborah Jackson Taffa is director of the MFA program in creative writing at the renowned Institute of American Indian Arts and a hometown treasure here in Santa Fe. Her memoir Whiskey Tender, about growing up as a mixed-tribe Native American torn by the pressures of assimilation, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, as well as longlisted for a Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. The memoir was named a Top Ten Book of 2024 by The Atlantic and Time Magazine. It also made top book lists at Esquire, NPR, Elle, Audible, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, and other outlets. The Washington Postpraised Whiskey Tender for its “mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and its excavation of a particular place and time”—that being New Mexico’s Navajo territory in the 1970s and ’80s. Taffa is a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is also Editor Emeritus of the literary magazine River Styx.