Luis Valdez elevates Chicano narratives to cinema through Zoot Suit and La Bamba, overcoming political and industry pushback to create landmark films that broaden and honor America's cultural story.

Please join CCA for our ongoing Community Reading Series in the Munoz Waxman Gallery. This event features Richard Chess, Emily Hyland, Priyanka Kumar, and Santana Shorty. Readings are curated by former Santa Fe poet laureate Elizabeth Jacobson with support from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.

The feature film in this year's Confluence series is the documentary Requiem for a River, which explores the New Mexico stretch of the Rio Grande — an iconic but endangered American waterway — in a time of climate change and calls for environmental justice. Through lyrical imagery and in-depth interviews with a diverse range of residents — Native, Latinx, Indo-Hispanic and Anglo — this visually poetic documentary reveals the once-mighty river’s role as a lifeline in the desert and asks whether the keys to a more sustainable, equitable future lie in New Mexico’s ancient past.

The bold Tira works as dancing beauty and lion tamer at a fair. Out of an urgent need of money, she agrees to a risky new number: she'll put her head into the lion's mouth! With this attraction, the circus makes it to New York and Tira can pursue her dearest occupation— flirting with rich men and accepting expensive presents.

Thursdays, 4:30-6:30p Sept 17, 24, Oct 1, 8 Cost: $250 (For all four classes) Location: CCA Conference Room his fall, poet Elizabeth Jacobson is offering a new session of her popular workshop series Intimate Immersion. During this four-week in-person intensive, the focus is on generating new poems, critiquing each participant’s work, revising poems, and looking at elements of craft. Each meeting, participants are invited to bring a new poem (with copies for everyone) for workshop discussion. Since this is the first look, the process creates a deep, concentrated attention different from preparing critique notes ahead of time. Additionally, contemporary poems are provided as a catalyst for the following week’s writing prompt. This is an intimate, focused immersion to reinforce the writing practice and foster the evolution of new poems. No class fees can be refunded after two weeks prior to start date. Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her third collection of poems, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral" is just out from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her previous book, "Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air” won the New Measure Poetry Prize (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019) and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the reviews editor for the online literary journal Terrain.org. This program is supported by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry

A Parisian tailor finds himself posing as a baron in order to collect a sizeable bill from an aristocrat, only to fall in love with an aloof young princess.

If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated best-selling poet, Pulitzer Prize-winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly fifty years in order to open herself – and her readers – to the known and unknowable world. From a lonely childhood to literary fame, Oliver’s life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. Her poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites, speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about attention, presence, and the human relationship with the natural world – issues that feel especially pressing in an era of climate crisis, digital distraction, and social fragmentation. Featuring interviews with her close friends, including John Waters, never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive, and recitations of her work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, and Oprah Winfrey, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World considers the poet’s long lifetime of work in context, capturing the uniqueness of her world and the natural beauty that inspired her.

Sunday, August 30, 2-3:30 pm In-person in the CCA Conference Room How can poems enact and invite this listening and relationship with the living world around us? The practice of ecopoetry becomes a practice of attending, of deep listening, and poetry can become a reciprocal practice that deepens our attention to our own interiority and helps us connect more deeply with the living land. The poet Mary Oliver guides us, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Poetry begins with a practice of deep, open listening with all our senses to the living world inside and outside of us. In this workshop, we’ll look at several poetic moves that can help us to evoke a sense of wonder and relationship with different living beings we encounter. We’ll read poems together that exemplify these different strategies and we’ll use these poems as prompts for our own writing and exploration in class. Please bring your writing tools. Anne Haven McDonnell teaches as a full professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her most recent collection Singing Under Snow won the Wheelbarrow Prize with MSU Press (Feb. 2026). Her other books include Breath on a Coal, winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Living with Wolves from Split Rock Press. She is co-creator of the forthcoming Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Mountaineers Books, spring 2027). Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, a MacDowell fellowship, and poetry prizes from Narrative Magazine, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, and a Terrain.org poetry prize. This program is supported by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry

Saturday, Sept. 26, 2-3:30 pm In-person in the CCA Conference Room Once a poem, at some point in the writing process, begins to come into focus, we devote our time to sharpening the focus that has emerged. But, what might happen if we resisted the urge to “finish” the poem? What if, instead, we paused and considered new directions suggested by a line, a sentence, or a stanza--maybe even a syllable, vowel, or consonant! --that point toward a different focus, a different vision for the poem, a vision perhaps far from our original intentions? What might happen if we were to “dwell in possibility,” as Emily Dickinson suggests? In this workshop, we’ll take Dickinson as our guide. Grounded in a variety of contemplative practices, we’ll read a few poems by others and, informed and inspired by those, we’ll draft our own poems. We’ll identify new directions to explore, suggested by what we’ve already written. As we head in one or more of these new directions, we will gain a sense of how our work can grow in ways we may only discover by “dwelling in possibility”. Please bring your writing tools. Richard Chess is the author of four books of poetry, including Love Nailed to the Doorpost (University of Tampa Press 2017) and The Loneliest Monk (Orison Books, July 2026). His work has been included in Best American Spiritual Writing 2005 and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is a regular contributor to “Close Reading,” the blog hosted by SLANT Books. He was a founding member of the board of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. He also served on the board of Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center. He is professor emeritus from the UNC Asheville, where, for 30 years, he directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies. www.richardchess.com This program is supported by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry

The screen adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s beloved memoir tells the true story of a literature professor in revolutionary Iran who, amidst censorship and religious extremism, gathers seven of her most dedicated female students to immerse themselves in banned literary classics. A film by Eran Riklis starring Golshifteh Farahani (Paterson), Zar Amir (Holy Spider), and Mina Kavani (No Bears).

New Mexico 1776 Renesan Course Information: Imagine what life was like in New Mexico in 1776, the year of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. State Historian of New Mexico Rob Martínez will take you there, using the Domínguez Report of 1776 to explore what the peoples, places, foods, and cultures were like in this most significant year of our nation’s history. Instructor: Rob Martinez is a native New Mexican born and raised in Albuquerque. A graduate of the University of New Mexico with a B.B.A. in International Business Management, Rob went on to pursue his interest in New Mexican culture and history at UNM, earning an M.A. in Latin American history, with an emphasis on church, cultural, and social practices of the Spanish Colonial period in New Mexico.

Tenor Madness in Jazz: From Coleman Hawkins to Sonny Rollins Renesan Course Information:The history of jazz can be understood by listening to how musicians have played their instruments over the years. Listeners can appreciate different jazz styles—swing, bop, hard bop, cool, and modal—by listening to the great tenor improvisers. Just as the guitar has come to signify rock ’n roll, the saxophone has become a symbol of jazz. We’ll explore stylistic masters of the instrument from Coleman Hawkins to Sonny Rollins. About The Instructor: Mark Davis has presented numerous jazz sessions for Renesan, most recently on Miles Davis in December 2025.

The Fall Migration: Birds Heading South Course:The fall migration is underway, and our feathered friends are heading south for the winter. Why do they migrate and what can we do in our own backyards to help them? What birds might you see now and in the coming months in Santa Fe? And what birds are we unlikely to see again until spring? Janie Chodosh will answer these and other questions. Instructor: Janie Chodosh is an environmental educator, birder, and author who writes about the natural world. Her new book “Travels with Rufous” will be published in March 2027. She currently teaches at Santa Fe Community College and is the educator for Wild Friends, a civics and conservation organization through the University of New Mexico School of Law.

The Greatest Comic Opera You've Never Heard Of Course: The greatest comic opera you’ve probably never heard or seen is Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, an ensemble comedy from 1849 with a text that closely follows Shakespeare’s play. It overflows with lyrical Italianate melodies, boasts a witty, richly Germanic orchestration, and features act finales worthy of Mozart. The many comic elements are handled with a deftness and charm unequaled by any other German composer of the era. About The Instructor: Mark Tiarks has given many Renesan presentations on film, theater, classical music, and opera, and has won multiple national and state awards for his writing on the same subjects for The Santa Fe New Mexican. He’s a Carleton College alumnus and a Watson Foundation fellowship recipient.

The Mysterious Denisovans: Relationships Course: Neandertals are familiar to most of us—but Denisovans? Who were they and what do they have to do with us? A contemporary of Neandertals, these early hominins lived in the later Pleistocene, but, unlike Neandertals, their primary habitat was East Asia. Relatively new DNA and fossil evidence have revealed information about their connections with other archaic hominins and early modern humans. About The Instructor: Fred H. Smith is a human paleontologist who has worked and published extensively on later human evolution for more than 50 years. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a past president of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.

Set in 1851, a mute Scottish woman arrives in colonial New Zealand for an arranged marriage, with her precocious young daughter and beloved piano in tow. Her practical new husband refuses to transport the piano to their home and makes a deal with his neighbor, George Baines to take the piano off his hands. Attracted to Ada, Baines agrees to return the piano in exchange for a series of piano lessons that become a series of increasingly charged sexual encounters. As pent-up emotions of rage and desire swirl around all three characters, the savage wilderness begins to consume the tiny European enclave.

Provincial lord of the Arioka Castle, Murashige Araki, rebels against tyrannical despot Oda Nobunaga, and makes a stand at his stronghold castle. He decides to take siege but is subsequently surrounded by Oda’s forces, leaving its denizens isolated and in need of allies. With the sensitive support of his wife Chiyoho, Murashige struggles to keep his hot-blooded retainers in check, while also protecting the castle and its people. One day, a young samurai is murdered within the fortress with the mysterious killer unknown. A succession of bizarre incidents follows. The suspects are Murashige’s close retainers and the people inside the Arioka Castle’s land. Outside, enemy troops lie in wait. Inside, traitors lie to conceal themselves. As suspicion runs rampant, Murashige seeks the help of a prisoner in his dungeon—dangerous master tactician Kanbei Kuroda—to solve the mysteries.

A wealthy but neurotic Southern belle finds herself trapped in the hideout of a gang of vicious bootleggers. The gang's leader lusts after her, and is determined not to let anything stand in the way of his having her.