Los Alamos High AP literature students meet author Lauren Groff

Los Alamos High School AP Literature and Composition students stepped out of the classroom and into a private meet-and-greet with Lauren Groff, giving them a direct encounter with one of the country’s most visible contemporary writers. Groff, listed by the Santa Fe International Literary Festival as a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times bestselling author, has written Fates and Furies, Matrix, The Vaster Wilds and the new story collection Brawler.

The visit placed Los Alamos students inside a festival that has become a major literary gathering in northern New Mexico. The Santa Fe International Literary Festival has been held annually since 2023 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center on the third weekend of May, and it draws around 20,000 attendees. Its 2026 lineup also includes Judy Blume, Isabel Wilkerson, Ocean Vuong, James McBride, Rebecca Solnit and other nationally recognized voices, underscoring the scale of the setting students entered.

For Los Alamos Public Schools, the outing showed how a local AP classroom can connect to a much larger academic and artistic network. Students studying literature at Los Alamos High School were not only reading major works for credit; they were also meeting a working author in person and hearing directly from a writer whose books are part of the modern literary canon. That kind of access can deepen classroom discussion in ways that a textbook or lecture cannot, especially for students already preparing for college-level reading and writing.

The festival experience was also part of a pattern, not a one-off. In 2025, Los Alamos High AP English Literature students and alumni attended the same festival to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen speak, and AP Literature teacher Catherine Puranananda teaches Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer every year. Together, the two festival outings point to a broader question for the district: how Los Alamos decides which students get these opportunities, and how much those encounters feed back into campus learning.

For a community that often measures its schools by rigor and results, the value of the trip was clear. Students from Los Alamos High School were able to meet a nationally known author, see professional literary programming up close and bring that experience back to a campus where college readiness is shaped by more than classroom assignments alone.