Selling Ann Nolan Clark Books in Albuquerque: The Tesuque Teacher Who Won the Newbery

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 30, 2026 · ~1,800 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred, who has bought and sorted New Mexico estate libraries for a decade.

The teacher of Tesuque

Anna Marie Nolan was born in 1896 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, into a family well enough known that their home, the Nolan House, stands today on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the town’s first quarry-stone houses. She graduated at twenty-one from New Mexico Normal School — now New Mexico Highlands University — married Thomas Patrick Clark in 1919, and lost her only son, a pilot, in World War II. In the early 1920s she took a job teaching reading to the children of Tesuque Pueblo, and stayed for twenty-five years.

It was there she became a writer. The school could not afford instructional material, so Clark made her own, weaving the children’s own stories and the rhythms of their lives into readers they could actually recognize. Between 1940 and 1951 the Bureau of Indian Affairs published fifteen of her books, drawn from that Tesuque work, and in 1945 the Institute for Inter-American Affairs sent her to live and travel for five years across Mexico and South America — the journeys that produced her Newbery winner. She wrote thirty-one books in all, almost all of them looking at Native cultures through the eyes of their children, and died in Arizona in 1995 at ninety-nine.

In My Mother’s House, the BIA readers, and Secret of the Andes

Clark’s most celebrated New Mexico book is In My Mother’s House (1941), a prose-poem of Tesuque village life illustrated by the Pueblo artist Velino Herrera (Ma Pe Wi) of Zia Pueblo; it was named a Caldecott Honor book in 1942 and is a landmark of Native-illustrated children’s publishing. Around it sits her extraordinary run of Bureau of Indian Affairs “Indian Life Readers” from the 1940s — Little Navajo Bluebird, the Little Herder seasonal books, Young Hunter of Picuris, Little Boy with Three Names: Stories of Taos Pueblo, and more — small, scarce, often Native-illustrated volumes that are increasingly sought by collectors of Southwest and Native Americana.

Her Newbery Medal came in 1953 for Secret of the Andes (Viking, 1952), a Peru-set novel that famously took the medal the year Charlotte’s Web was only an Honor book. She kept writing Southwest-rooted books for decades — Santiago, Blue Canyon Horse, Tia Maria’s Garden, Medicine Man’s Daughter, The Desert People — and recorded her teaching philosophy in the memoir Journey to the People (1969). She received the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal in 1963.

First-edition identification

Clark’s books split into trade titles and scarce government imprints, identified differently:

• Secret of the Andes — look for the 1952 Viking first in jacket, distinguished from the post-Newbery printings; as with any Newbery book, the gold-seal reprints are common and the early jacketed first is the value.
• In My Mother’s House — the Velino Herrera illustrations are the point. The early Viking printings with Herrera’s artwork intact are the collectible object; check that the plates are present and the jacket original.
• The Bureau of Indian Affairs readers are the sleeper category. These 1940s government-printed booklets had small distributions, often within Indian schools, and survive in modest numbers; an intact BIA Indian Life Reader — especially a Native-illustrated title — is genuinely scarce and is exactly the kind of item that gets discarded as a “cheap old school book” by someone who doesn’t know.

The collector market — three tiers

Tier 1 — trophy: a 1952 Viking first of Secret of the Andes in jacket; an early In My Mother’s House with the Velino Herrera plates; scarce Native-illustrated Bureau of Indian Affairs readers; and any signed copy.

Tier 2 — collector: the other 1940s BIA readers (Little Navajo Bluebird, the Little Herder books, the Pueblo stories); first trade editions of Santiago, Blue Canyon Horse, and the later Southwest titles.

Tier 3 — reading copies: ex-library hardcovers, later printings, and paperbacks. These keep her work in young readers’ hands and are the copies that do the most good donated back into New Mexico classrooms.

Where she turns up — and how NMLP handles her

Clark’s books cluster in exactly the New Mexico places you’d expect: estates in Las Vegas, Santa Fe, and the northern villages; the libraries of teachers, Pueblo families, and collectors of Native Americana; and the shelves of anyone who grew up on the Indian Life Readers. The trade Newbery book is common enough; the BIA readers and the Herrera-illustrated In My Mother’s House are the scarce, easily-overlooked treasures — small, plain-looking books that a hurried cleanout tosses without a second glance.

When her books come through a New Mexico Literacy Project pickup, the handling is the same as for any collectible New Mexico author: scarce BIA imprints, Native-illustrated firsts, jacketed Newbery firsts, and signed copies are identified by hand and routed to specialist dealers or kept for the regional record rather than bulk-sorted; clean trade hardcovers go through careful resale; and reading copies go back to New Mexico kids and classrooms. Nothing readable is landfilled. If you are clearing a New Mexico home and a small old book about Pueblo or Navajo children makes you pause, that pause is worth a text.

External References

• Wikipedia: Ann Nolan Clark — life, the Tesuque years, and full bibliography.
• Ann Nolan Clark Manuscripts, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Santa Fe.
• Ann Nolan Clark Papers, de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, University of Southern Mississippi.
• Secret of the Andes — the 1953 Newbery Medal novel.

Related on This Site

• Joseph Krumgold — the other New Mexico Newbery Medalist, whose …And Now Miguel won the very next year.
• New Mexico Native American Literature — the Pueblo and Navajo tradition Clark’s books helped open to young readers.
• Fabiola Cabeza de Baca — a fellow New Mexico Normal School graduate and recorder of village life.
• Adolph Bandelier — the earlier student of the Pueblo world Clark taught within.
• The New Mexico Literary Atlas — where Las Vegas and Tesuque sit in the state’s literary geography.