Award winning author and journalist, Iris Keltz, was born and raised in New York City and came of age during the height of the counterculture. After traveling cross country during the summer of Woodstock, 1969, she found a home in northern New Mexico. Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie: Tribal Tales from the Heart of a Cultural Revolution (Cinco Puntos Press, 2000) documents the heroic attempt of urban dropouts to create a utopian society.

Unexpected Bride in the Promised Land: Journeys in Palestine and Israel (Nighthawk Press, Taos, NM, 2000) is her second historical memoir. Keltz might be the only Jew— American or Israeli, to have found sanctuary with the Palestinians during a war that changed the face of the Middle East. Raised on the narrative of Jewish suffering in a Diaspora culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, the Israeli military victory in 1967 could have been a jubilant moment for her. But it was not. This life changing eye-witness to history became the spark that ignited Keltz to speak out for Palestinian human rights.

She currently works as freelance journalist and lecturer. She is a founding member of Jewish Voice for Peace-Albuquerque. Retired from a forty-year teaching career, Keltz remains living in the Rio Grand Valley, forever love with the landscape and culture of Northern New Mexico.