KATE NELSON
A Force of Nature
After several unsuccessful efforts to snag an interview with Los Alamos outdoorsman Craig Martin, managing editor Kate Nelson had a no-fail idea: Include a hike in her request. “When I met him at the trailhead, he was bent over, inspecting some wildflowers—pretty much proto-Craig,” she says. They headed up the trail, then settled on a log for some Q&A with a view. “Now I want to interview everyone on a log,” says Nelson. She won a silver award from the International Regional Magazine Association for a collection of her New Mexico Magazine stories and also wrote the biography Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved (Golden Dawn, 2012).
JOHN MULLER
The Great Unknown
Contributing writer John Muller was buried in a book at St. John’s College in Santa Fe when a librarian friend tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a Post-It note with two words: Stephen Bodio. “You’ve got to profile this guy,” he whispered. “He’s this incredible writer who’s also one of America’s premier falconers. He lives out in western New Mexico with a bunch of animals, and only a handful of literary and outdoors types have ever heard of him.” Before moving to Brooklyn for law school last year, Muller trekked to Magdalena to meet Bodio. “It was a perfect farewell,” he says. “The mountains, the friendly people, the high desert that goes on forever—why would anyone want to write anywhere else?”
IRIS KELTZ
Commune to Community
Born and raised in New York City, Iris Keltz traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East before settling in New Mexico in the late sixties. Her first book, Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie: Tribal Tales from the Heart of a Cultural Revolution (Cinco Puntos Press, 2000), was named one of the top 10 books of the past 100 years in New Mexico Magazine’s centennial issue. “I might not have always understood the historic import of the mind-boggling events happening around me in New Mexico’s counterculture, but I have always appreciated the power and joy of a great story,” she says. Her new book, Unexpected Bride in the Promised Land: Journeys in Palestine (Nighthawk Press), comes out this spring.