About author Debra Hughes

Debra Hughes author photo — Author photo by Anne Staveley

Debra Hughes is the author of the debut novel The Geology of Secrets, a 2025 finalist for the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence and is the first book of fiction in the University of Georgia Press/Columbus State University Press’s Nature Series, and the nonfiction book Albuquerque in Our Time: 30 Voices, 300 Years (Museum of New Mexico Press).Her short fiction has been anthologized in Tierra: Short Fiction of New Mexico and Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest and has appeared in Image Journal, New Letters, Blue Mesa Review,and others. A native of New Mexico, her writing touches on the region’s land and its people, for which she received the International Regional Magazine Silver Award. Her essays and articles have been published in Narrative Magazine, Huffington Post, The Writer’s Harbrace Handbook, New Mexico Magazine, USA Today,and elsewhere. Hughes holds an M.A. in American Literature and Creative Writing from Ohio State University. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, New Mexico Writers, and serves on the advisory board of the Leopold Writing Program. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.

Endorsements

"Debra Hughes writes with elegant restraint and compelling narrative tension, and her knowledge of the Western landscape adds stunning precision and urgency to her storyteller's art.When you read Hughes' work, you cannot help but admire how perfectly her thoughtful, chiseled prose reveals a deeply wise, engaged heart." – Melissa Pritchard, author of Flight of the Wild Swan, A Solemn Pleasure and Palmerino

“The stories of Debra Hughes capture the people and landscape of New Mexico. The perspective reveals the inner heart of women living in the frontier spaces which they partly create, spaces which also reflect a social trap. Her characters seek freedom, liberation from the smallness of life which often drowns those more weak-willed. Debra’s fiction is flavored with deep textures, colors and corners which create a unique world within a harsher reality. She is an important voice in the fiction of the Southwest. I was happy to publish her in TIERRA: CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION OF NEW MEXICO, an anthology which included only 24 writers.” – Rudolfo Anaya, Editor, Blue Mesa Review