Writing Life into History
Getting to the compelling details behind real characters and events
What: Free panel discussion and Q and A with four non-fiction writers
When: Tuesday, June 26, 6 p.m.
Where: Collected Works, 202 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe
On Tuesday, June 26, four great writers dish on how they turn historical events and figures into gripping non-fiction works. James McGrath Morris, Virginia Scharff, Alex Heard and Sally Denton have written books covering a wide range of topics from politics to assassination plots, civil rights to wagon trains. The event is sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists – Rio Grande Chapter and The Santa Fe New Mexican.
James McGrath Morris
Morris is the author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power and president of Biographers International Organization. He is currently working on Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne’s Journey Through the Civil Rights Revolution. He lives near Santa Fe.
Virginia Scharff
Virginia Scharff is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, and Women of the West Chair at the Autry National Center of the American West. She is author and editor of history books including The Women Jefferson Loved and Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement and the West. Scharff has also published four mystery novels under the name of Virginia Swift. Scharff is working on a book about the history of the United States in four recipes. Schaarf lives in Albuquerque.
Alex Heard
Heard is the editorial director at Outside Magazine. He has also worked as an editor at Wired and The New York Times Magazine. He has written for The New Republic, Slate, The Washington Post Magazine, Spy, and Harper’s. He’s author of Apocalypse Pretty Soon and The Eyes of Willie McGee, a 2010 history of a Southern interracial rape trial and subsequent execution that made international headlines in the early 1950s. Heard lives in Santa Fe.
Sally Denton
Investigative reporter, author and historian, Denton’s latest book is The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation In Crisis and the Rise of the American Right, (Bloomsbury Press, 2012). She’s also written about the Fremonts, pioneer women and the rise of Las Vegas. She is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2010 Woodrow Wilson Public Scholar fellow and was inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2008. Denton lives in Santa Fe.
