Promising to discover how people really live in our nation’s highly symbolic, deeply mythologized frontier, two Swedes venture to the American West with pen and camera.

Take the US annexation of the Philippines. Around 1898, the US touted itself as an anti-imperialist nation, home of equality, but then it invaded a foreign nation under the auspices of white Christian duty: Save the heathen islanders. This, according to John Sayles, who visits Santa Fe to talk about his work, including the book A Moment in the Sun.

Visit Santa Fe’s Plaza on any Saturday afternoon, and a diverse throng of locals and tourists, buskers and gawkers, buyers and sellers, and artists and lunch-eaters will be milling in and around it.

In 1998, Eve Ensler published The Vagina Monologues, and suddenly a word that many viewed as vulgar became a powerful—and positive—force. This year’s V-Day performance in Santa Fe—a performance of Ensler’s new collection of monologues, I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World—benefits the Santa Fe Mountain Center.

In her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood describes a future in which humanity has all but obliterated itself through scientific hubris and indifference to the environment. SFR spoke with Atwood by phone from her hotel room in Chicago.

Tony Hillerman began his career as a journalist for The Santa Fe New Mexican and went on to author more than 30 books, most of which were mystery novels set in New Mexico—more specifically, Navajo lands. Hillerman died last October at the age of 83.

In The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks, author Robin Romm has opened herself to the world in a courageous little book that chronicles the three weeks before her mother Jackie’s death. Romm tells stories of her childhood and young adulthood but manages to avoid the sentimentality into which many memoirs can easily fall.

An interview with Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks.

Since 9.11, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become one of the world’s most outspoken opponents of radical Islam, specifically the way Islam is used to justify the subjugation of women. She, along with Irshad Manji, discusses this topic in “Irreconcilable Differences: Two Women on Islam Today.”

Get your poem on.