Keynote Panel
Sunday, February 16
4:00–5:30 p.m.

$35.00

PANEL | Panelists: John Irving, Percival Everett, Jorge F. Hernández, Ruth Reichl, Kaveh Akbar, John Vaillant, Jennifer Clement, and the Giller Prize Winner. It is rare in the literary world for so many famous authors to appear together in one event. In this lively panel, all of our illustrious keynote speakers will engage in discussions in a Q & A format. Questions from attendees will be gathered during the week, and the authors will be encouraged to engage in discussions with each other as well.

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This event is open to the public, offering those who don’t attend individual keynote addresses the opportunity to meet these distinguished writers.

About John Irving

John Irving has written sixteen novels over the course of his prolific career, the majority of which have been international bestsellers, and which have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. His beloved titles include The World According to Garp, which won the National Book Award; Cider House Rules; A Widow for One Year; and A Prayer for Owen Meany, which is his bestselling novel in every language. Irving won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Cider House Rules. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968 when he was twenty-six years old.

Irving was also a competitive wrestler for twenty years. He coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Irving lives in Toronto and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.

By John Irving:

About Percival Everett

Percival Everett, one of the most innovative writers in contemporary American literature, is the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

He has written more than thirty books including novels, poetry, and short story collections which have won numerous prizes and international accolades. His captivating and immensely diverse collection of genre-bending literary works challenges and inspires readers to contemplate and reconsider the societal and cultural forces that shape our worldviews.

His most recent books include James, an instant New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by the New York Times Book Review; Dr. No, finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; The Trees, finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Telephone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; So Much Blue;Erasure;
and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023.

Everett lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and
their children.

By Percival Everett:

About Jorge F. Hernández

Jorge F. Hernández is the author of five novels, three short story collections, and numerous essays and newspaper columns over many years. Of special interest to us in San Miguel, he wrote Microhistory of the Sanctuary of Atononilco, for which he won the Atanasio G. Saravia National Prize for Banamex Regional History.

His anthology entitled Sun, Stone and Shadows: Twenty Mexican Short Story Writers from the First Half of the 20th Century was chosen for the United States government reading program as a book in The Big Read of the National Endowment for the Arts, in its English translation.

He has taught at various institutions in both Mexico and Spain including UNAM, ITAM, Universidad Anáhuac, the Hellenic Cultural Center, and the Foundation for Mexican Letters.

As a radio personality, he was host of the “Golpe de dados,” a cultural news program on channel 22 of Mexican television during 2010. He collaborated with Leo Zuckerman and Julio Patán on the program “Artículo Sexto” on Radio Formula in 2012 and 2013.

Jorge F. Hernández was Minister of Cultural Affairs of the Mexican Embassy in Spain and Director of the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Madrid. He also helped to rescue the oldest bookstore in Madrid, which had been destined to become a pizza parlor! He was born in Mexico City and spent his childhood in Cologne, Germany, and Washington, D.C. where his father was a diplomat for Mexico’s foreign service.

By Jorge F. Hernández:

Jorge F. Hernández, Sol, Piedra y Sombra Jorge F. Hernández La Emperatriz de Lavapiés

About Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl is an American chef, food writer and editor who, for ten years, was the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine. In addition to two decades as a food critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, Reichl has also written cookbooks, memoirs and novels. She was culinary editor for the Modern Library and has won six James Beard Foundation Awards.

Reichl was co-producer of PBS’s Gourmet Diary of a Foodie and was host of PBS’s Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth.

Her memoirs are Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Not Becoming My Mother, and Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019). In 2009, she published Gourmet Today, a 1,008-page cookbook containing over 1,000 recipes.

She published her first novel Delicious! in 2014 and, in 2015, published My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life, a memoir of recipes prepared in the year following the shuttering of Gourmet. Her most recent novel is entitled The Paris Novel.

By Ruth Reichl:

About Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022).

In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize.

Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.”

Kaveh Akbar is known for his poetry, and now his 2024 debut novel Martyr! is garnering rave reviews:

“So stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe.”

— John Green

From previous San Miguel Writers’ Conference keynoters:
“I haven’t loved a book this much in years.”

— Tommy Orange

“Kaveh Akbar has given birth to a hilarious marvel of a novel. Rip-roaringly funny. Wise and wise-assed.”

— Mary Karr

By Kaveh Akbar:

About John Vaillant

John Vaillant’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Vaillant has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Walrus. He lives in Vancouver.

About Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement is the author of five novels, two memoirs, and several books of poetry. Two of her novels were New York Times Editor’s Choice books. Both Elle Magazine and the French Ministry of Education awarded prizes to her novel Prayers for the Stolen, which was made into a movie in 2021. Her novel Gun Love was an Oprah Book Club selection and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Time Magazine and several other publications named it one of the ten best books of 2018. Her books have been translated into thirty-eight languages.

Clement is the only woman to hold the office of President of PEN International, 2015 to 2021. Under her leadership, the groundbreaking PEN International Women’s Manifesto and The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto were created. When she was President of PEN Mexico, she was instrumental in changing the law to make the crime of killing a journalist a federal crime.

Jennifer Clement has received awards for both her writing and her humanitarian work, including fellowships from Guggenheim, NEA, MacDowell and Santa Maddalena; a Hispanics in Philanthropy Award for her contribution to Latino Communities; the 2023 Freedom of Expression Honorary title for World Press Day in Brussels; and numerous other awards.

Clement was raised in Mexico City. Together with her sister Barbara Sibley, she founded and ran Poetry Week every January in San Miguel de Allende for many years.

By Jennifer Clement: