The inimitable Cormac McCarthy arrived in the Southwest onaMacArthur Fellowship to write 1985’s lauded Blood Meridian. He hit it big with 1992’s existentialist western All the Pretty Horses, about three young men who ride south to Mexico on horseback, searching for somewhere not yet ruined. Protagonist John Grady Cole feels “a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret.” McCarthy pursues a low profile, but he’s one of Santa Fe’s own.

Of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca began writing poetry in prison, publishing Martin

and Meditations on the South Valley in 1987. He’s written poetry, memoirs, essays and the screenplay Bound by Honor, which Taylor Hackfordmade into the crime drama Blood In, Blood Out. The charismatic Baca often ponders social justice in his work.

Chicana author and playwright Denise Chávez emerged with 1986’s The Last of the Menu Girls, about a young woman growing up in southern NewMexico. Subsequent novels, including Loving Pedro Infante and A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, brought her the American Book Award in 1995. She’s known for exploring the borders between people, as well as for creating the multifaceted Border Book Festival (now defunct) in her hometown of Las Cruces.