Literary festival hires executive director to manage growth

Sep. 14—The Santa Fe International Literary Festival is hiring an executive director, a move organizers say is needed to manage its explosive growth in the last few years.

The festival hired Megan Mulry, a native of Long Island, N.Y., who spent her early career working for magazines in the Northeast before moving to Florida and becoming an accomplished writer of romance novels. She moved to Santa Fe eight years ago to work as communications director at Radius Books, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that publishes and donates books to over 500 institutions across the country.

Last year's festival filled more than 15,000 seats, according to organizers, prompting the creation of an executive director position to better manage the workloads of heads Mark Bryant, Carmella Padilla, and Claire Hertel.

"We are thrilled to have Megan join our small but mighty team," Hertel said in a news release. "Her combined skills as a community organizer, fundraiser, and writer make her a great match for the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, whose mission is to feed and foster, in all people, a love of stories and the written word."

Hertel, alongside co-founder Julia Leonard, launched the festival in May 2022, then called the Santa Fe Literary Festival. It was rebranded with "international" in 2023 after the first festival filled 9,000 seats and sold thousands of books.

Mulry's relationship with the city is more storied than a job offer. She first visited with her parents in 1992 after her father gave her a copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather's 1927 novel based partially on the story of Jean Baptiste-Lamy, the first Catholic archbishop of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

"She wrote really beautifully about this place and the sense of place which you start to feel," she said. "I had been here once with my parents [in 1992], but it stuck in the back of my mind. There's just this cultural magnetism about the city."

Mulry credits her time at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut, specifically English teacher Alice M. DeLana, for inspiring her love of books by recommending off-the-curriculum, thought-provoking texts like The Color Purple, Orlando, and Pride and Prejudice.

"She instilled a love of reading in generations of young women," Mulry said.

"I think especially young people can feel trapped," she added. "Stories were a joy of my rather tumultuous adolescence — to have those books was a sort of comfort. Because there's a whole world out there."

The festival, Mulry said, is working hard to expand that outreach to students. The festival set aside 1,500 free tickets for educators and students in 2024, of which only 800 were claimed.

"I think it's a problem with a lot of our education systems that reading can feel so prescribed," said Mulry.

The festival is working with groups like Institute of American Indian Arts and local librarians to get young people excited about storytelling. Her own son, she said, found that excitement in comic books.

"I'm just really, genuinely excited for the festival," she said. "And so excited to work with so many people in the community. To love it so much makes it an easy job. It's easy to love," she said.

The Santa Fe New Mexican is a sponsor of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. The next festival will take place from May 16-18, 2025. Authors who will take part in 2025 include Amy Tan, Michael Pollan, Percival Everett, Michael Cunningham, Heather Cox Richardson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, with more to be announced later, festival organizers said in a news release.

Tickets will go on sale in January.