Author Announcements

A Guardian and a Thief

Megha Majumdar is the author of the novel "A Guardian and a Thief," which was named a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Her debut novel, the New York Times bestseller “A Burning,” was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was a TODAY show Read With Jenna Book Club Pick and a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. Majumdar is the recipient of a Whiting Award, as well as of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden foundations. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, and educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, she now lives in New York.

The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America

2026 Mountain Words Featured Presenter

David Baron is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author of The Beast in the Garden and American Eclipse. A former science correspondent for NPR, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and other publications. David recently served as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

2026 Mountain Words Featured Presenter

Nina McConigley is an award-winning writer whose work explores identity, belonging, and cultural intersections in the American West. She is the author of Cowboys and East Indians, which won the PEN Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Salon, and American Short Fiction. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, she teaches at Colorado State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her play Cowboys and East Indians was presented at the 2024 Colorado New Play Summit, and her debut novel will be released in 2026.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Big news! Terry Tempest Williams, author of over 20 books, will be joining the 2026 Mountain Words Festival as a key speaker!

Terry Tempest Williams is a writer, naturalist, and activist known for her impassioned prose and fierce advocacy for environmental and social justice. She is the author of Refuge, When Women Were Birds, Erosion, and The Hour of Land, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Orion. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award, and the Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2025–26 Emerson Collective Fellow, she is currently writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.