Katy Hammel

A chance visit to Bookworks bookstore in Albuquerque introduced Katy to National Novel Writing Month and she wrote her first novel in 2013. Since then she has helped more than 50 of her students publish novels of their own as well. Katy is a National Board Certified Teacher. She was voted New Mexico Teacher of the Year by the New Mexico Association of the Gifted in 2013. Most recently, she was Gilder Lehrman's New Mexico History Teacher of the Year for 2025.

Her novels and short stories have won a variety of awards. Meg Goes to America was the 2019 Gold Medal Winner of the Douglas Preston Award for Published Fiction in the Albuquerque Museum Foundation Celebration of Writing. Meg and the Rocks was the 2023 Winner of the WILLA (Willa Cather) Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction given by Women Writing the West.

Katy also writes picture books intended to read aloud, most especially with children on the spectrum, to find the fun in decoding common social situations and phrases.