The Speakers Bureau has nearly thirty presenters and forty programs to choose from! With so many options, finding the right program for your organization can be a bit overwhelming. Let NMHC re-introduce you to some of our Speakers!

Darryl Wellington is the 2021-2023 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, NM His full-length first book is Psalms at the Present Time.

In Darryl’s Speakers Bureau program The Power of Indignation: Richard Wright, Black American Novelist, Darryl recreates Wright’s final days, looking back on his career, while delivering a lecture to an American audience in Paris. Richard Wright (1908-1960), the author of the novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiography Black Boy (1945) pioneered an influential school of protest literature. He became the first Black writer to pen a bestseller that overtly criticized racism and white supremacy. Born into dire poverty and oppression in segregated Mississippi, his journey to international success was unlikely. Following his success, Wright grew disillusioned with the United States, and, in 1947, relocated to France. Before his death in 1960, at age 52, he coined the phrase “Black power” in support of African anti-colonial revolutions.

Lynn Cline is the award-winning author of The Maverick Cookbook: Iconic Recipes and Tales from New Mexico and Literary Pilgrims: The Santa Fe and Taos Writers’ Colonies, 1917-1950.

Lynn’s Speakers Bureau Program The Foodways of New Mexico covers New Mexico’s rich culinary history, full of fascinating food traditions representing diverse cultures across the centuries. Ancestral Puebloan people, Spanish settlers and miners, cowboys and ranchers as well as pioneers along the Santa Fe Trail, railroad passengers and many others have all contributed New Mexico’s melting pot. The Foodways of New Mexico program introduces the many cultures that have shaped our culinary history along with the iconic people who’ve stirred the pot, including Doña Tules , Fred Harvey, Billy the Kid, Georgia O’Keeffe and the contemporary farmers, chefs and restaurateurs who continually cook up new ways to evolve our food traditions.

Fred Friedman holds a masters degree in U.S. History and English Literature, plus an extensive and practical understanding of the New Mexico’s territorial and state railroading past. This includes supervising the New Mexico Railroad Bureau for thirty years, developing a railroad history narrative for the traveling Van of Enchantment on behalf of the NM Tourism Department, and in 2018 he was recognized by the New Mexico State Historians Office as a State History Scholar.

Fred’s Speakers Bureau Program New Mexico’s Railroads: From Territory and Statehood to the Present explores the history of transportation in the state. Railroads were the “Space Program” of the 1880’s and New Mexico was a proving ground. The arrival of the Iron Steed changed everything from legislation to architecture. Amtrak, the Union Pacific and several smaller systems continue as major economic generators throughout the Land of Enchantment. Most towns in this state began as railroad communities, and their physical reminders, in the form of alignments, structures and vacant depots, have often been reinvented as civic buildings, hiking and biking trails. The state’s railroading legacy continues as tourist systems and new freight opportunities emerge throughout New Mexico.