Category: Author news

Podcast: Di Giminiani Discusses Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier

Posted on October 22, 2026October 15, 2026 by maryreynolds

October 22, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, author of Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier. Di Giminiani is an associate professor in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is also the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile.

Asked about how he defines a “conservation frontier,” Di Giminiani explained: “A frontier is something that we do to space. It’s a process rather than a geographical construct. So when I started working on forest conservation in southern Chile, I realized there were many overlapping histories that centered on one process: the transition from a resource frontier to a frontier where nature becomes a commodity for experiential tourism and the new green economy.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani’s Alterhumanism invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of coexistence.

Reflecting on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers, environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists, Di Giminiani brings to light how these diverse groups navigate the enduring impacts of settler-caused environmental depletion and their aspirations for new ethics of care. Di Giminiani challenges traditional Western humanism, proposing a more relational and open-ended understanding of humanity shaped by interactions with nonhuman others.

Podcast: Brenda L. Sendejo Explores Chicana Spiritual Activism

Posted on October 15, 2026 by maryreynolds

October 15, 2026

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Brenda L. Sendejo, author of Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul. Sendejo is a cultural anthropologist, consultant, and scholar-practitioner of spiritual activism. For two decades, she has collaborated with movement-era Chicanas in Texas, documenting their spiritual activism and illuminating its continued relevance for contemporary struggles. Sendejo holds a PhD, MA, and BA in cultural anthropology from University of Texas at Austin.

Asked about the concept of “making space and making soul” (based on the teachings of Gloria Anzaldúa), Sendejo answered: “We are the creators of our own identities. The idea of making soul is inspired by the Nahua philosophy. It’s the idea that our souls can speak to us and we can enact our souls in the world. It’s not this theoretical metaphysical idea, but that our actions in the world can be driven by our purpose, by our souls.. . . what I learned from the women [interviewed for this book] is that we can reconceptualize ideas of activism and personal transformation in many ways.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

This book explores the profound impact of spiritual activism within the Chicana feminist movement in Texas. It illuminates how a cohort of Texas Chicanas embraced spiritual activism in pursuit of social change during the movement and into the present day.

The book draws on an array of qualitative methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, testimonio, pláticas, and archival analysis—to develop what the author formulates as “methodologies of the spirit.” Focusing on the lived experiences, histories, and spiritual activism of sixteen Chicanas/Tejanas, Sendejo shows how these trailblazing women confronted the enduring impacts and repercussions of colonial legacies in Texas through their involvement in movement initiatives such as electoral politics through Mujeres Por La Raza, the cultural arts movement, developing Chicana feminist thought, and the establishment of bilingual education and Chicana/o studies programs.

The activists highlighted in the book include well-known figures such as Santa Barraza, Norma E. Cantú, Rosie Castro, Martha P. Cotera, Inés Hernández-Ávila, and others. Through their work, these activists emerged as architects of their own healing and transformation. Simultaneously, they opened avenues for others to embark on similar journeys reshaping religious practices and unearthing and disseminating spiritual, feminist, and ancestral knowledges.

Logan Phillips Named Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets

Posted on August 19, 2026 by maryreynolds

August 7, 2026

We are thrilled to announce that The Academy of American Poets named Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, as one of twenty-two Poet Laureate Fellows for 2026. “Poets laureate bring poetry out into public life, where language can help people feel less alone and more connected to one another,” said Robert Casper, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. “We are honored to support these twenty-two poets laureate as they create meaningful projects for their communities, and we are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its continued partnership in making this work possible.” The honor comes with $60,000 to promote a poet’s work in the community. Phillips will invest the funds in Tucson.

With this support he will organize “¡Somos Uno! Poetry & Storytelling,” a new series of events celebrating Tucson poets, artists, and cultural workers, while inviting in new audiences. Phillips says, “This is your invitation to be a part of it whether you identify as an artist or not, and from wherever you live in Southern Arizona.”

Join him Saturday, October 10, 4-6 p.m., in Armory Park for “Poets in the Park,” the official kickoff of the ¡Somos Uno! series to celebrate the work of 21 local poets who also organize poetry events across our city. The event includes food, music, and workshops. You can RSVP and find more info here.

¡Somos Uno! will provide a series of sparks for the local arts scene, opening space for youth poets to find community and continue the poetic path, with an emphasis on platforming Indigenous voices and offering an alternative to the loneliness, atomization, and fear created by the current technological and political climate, especially for Tucson Latinx communities.

Congratulations Logan!

About Logan Phillips’ recently published hybrid memoir, Reckon:

What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona?

In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”

As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.

Antonio De Jesús López Named Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets

Posted on August 19, 2026 by Cameron Quan

August 10, 2026

Please join us in celebrating the news that University of Arizona Press author Antonio De Jesús López, San Mateo County’s Poet Laureate, is among the twenty-two poets nationwide who will receive a 2026 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets!

Read the full announcement from the Academy of American Poets.

Antonio De Jesús López is a poet from East Palo Alto, California. He is the 2025–2027 poet laureate of San Mateo County and a former mayor and councilmember of East Palo Alto. He holds a PhD in modern thought and literature from Stanford University and serves as director of research and advocacy at Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS). He is the author of Gentefication and The Right to Remain Violets. His work explores race, public education, state violence, and the afterlives of segregation in American cities.

The Right to Remain Violets is an electrifying poetry collection that reimagines the language of policing, public education, and state surveillance to illuminate the lived realities of Black and Brown youth in East Palo Alto—a city shaped by redlining, freeway expansion, and decades of over-policing. Blending documentary poetics with hip-hop cadence and Catholic liturgy, Antonio De Jesús López transforms transcripts, municipal documents, and legal language into a powerful form of witness. These poems trace how children are drafted into systems of surveillance and criminalization, even as they search for joy and solidarity amid Silicon Valley’s contrasts of wealth and dispossession.

Congratulations to Antonio!

Video: David Burckhalter on “Baskets from the Seri Coast”

Posted on August 11, 2026July 15, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

August 11, 2026

David Burckhalter, author of Baskets from the Seri Coast: Comcaac Weavers and Their Craft, spoke as part of the Tumamoc Author Series.

In this Southwest Center video of the event, Burckhalter describes his research on the Seri people of Sonora, Mexico. Reflecting on the experience of more than 50 years working with the Seri people, Burckhalter says, “For me, it’s just been, an amazing time and I’m still going there and I have other projects I’m working on now. You know, I’m interested in how they lived in the past. . . . So I think that’s important to look back and try to recreate how they lived. And I’m doing it as a personal geography.”

He begins by explaining several of the most important terms from the book’s glossary. Burckhalter then describes the structure of the book, which is written in six parts, alternating between text and photo galleries. He then discusses the major groups of Seri women he considers the innovators of modern Seri basketry and their techniques and cultural heritage.

Watch the video here.

The event was presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center.

David Burckhalter is a photographer and research associate at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona. After settling in Tucson, he worked for years as an importer of Seri (Comcaac) arts and crafts into the United States. He continues to visit friends in Seri villages. He is the photographer/author of two other University of Arizona Press books: Baja California Missions: In the Footsteps of the Padres (2013) and The Seris (1976).

Video: Ted Fleming on “Birds, Bats, and Blooms”

Posted on July 21, 2026June 2, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

July 21, 2026

Theodore H. Fleming, author of Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants, spoke as part of the Tumamoc Author Series with Elise Gordes, director of the Desert Laboratory at Tumamoc Hill.

In this Southwest Center video of the event, Fleming discusses the history of pollination and pollination ecology, focusing on insects as well as the roles of other pollinators such as hummingbirds and bats. The talk explains why pollinators and flowers exist, and discusses the context for the evolution of pollination species. The book also discusses the Sonoran Desert’s specific pollination environment.

When discussing the Sonoran Desert, Fleming says, “So we’re in a really unique kind of environment here in which there are resources, flower resources for hummingbirds and nectar feeding bats. And that’s not the case in any other desert in the world.”

Watch the video here.

The event was presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center.

Theodore H. Fleming is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Miami. He spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He lives in Tucson.

Video: Patricia A. Gilman on “Mimbres Far from the Heartland”

Posted on July 14, 2026May 29, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

July 14, 2026

Patricia A. Gilman, coauthor of Mimbres Far From the Heartland: Identity at the Powers Ranch Site of East-Central Arizona, spoke as part of the Tumamoc Author Series.

In this Southwest Center video of the event, Gilman discusses the Mimbres culture and Powers Ranch site on the Gila River near Duncan, Arizona. The talk discusses the difference between Mimbres in the heartland (the Mimbres Valley) versus Mimbres outside the heartland, and why these communities aren’t peripheral, but their own local versions.

Reflecting on the themes of identity and archaeology, Gilman said, “One of the problems that I think we run into in cultural identity with prehistoric cultures. . . is that we identify them by their material culture. So our branch, the decorated wear is pretty much all embrace pottery. . . So, yes, we are in a territory where most of the people are making that pottery, but is that how they would actually identify themselves? So that was [what] one of our research questions was, are these people Mimbres?”

Watch the video here.

The event was presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center.

Patricia A. Gilman has done archaeological research in the Mimbres region of New Mexico and Arizona for more than fifty years. One of her research interests is the role of small Mimbres Classic sites beyond the Mimbres Valley. She co-authored Mimbres Life and Society: The Mattocks Site of Southwestern New Mexico and co-edited Mimbres Society and New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology. Dr. Gilman retired from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.

Podcast: Meena Khandelwal Discusses How Cookstoves Empower Women in India

Posted on July 9, 2026July 9, 2026 by maryreynolds

July 9, 2026

Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? In the latest University of Arizona podcast, Miranda Melcher interviews Meena Khandelwal, author of Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India about women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work in Rajasthan, India.

In the interview, Khandelwal, an anthropologist and women’s studies scholar, explains how environmentalists have blamed deforestation on the use of chulhas: “These stoves were mostly used by women, and they cut wood to use as fuel for daily cooking. So my engineering colleague and his students designed a solar cooker. These prototype stoves were abandoned after a couple years in the villages. My colleague realized that he had to better understand women’s cooking practices.” Khandelwal’s colleague invited her to collaborate, but before she went to Rajasthan to do field work, she noted, “I had to learn a whole lot about the region, and the social and environmental history, before I could even have an an opinion about cookstove improvement projects.”

Listen to the entire podcast here.

About the book:

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.

Video: Joe E. Watkins on “Indigenizing Japan”

Posted on July 7, 2026July 9, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

July 7, 2026

Joe Watkins, author of Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future, spoke as part of the Tumamoc Author Series with Carol J. Ellick, Executive Director of Archaeological and Cultural Education Consultants.

In this Southwest Center video of the event, Watkins discusses his work with the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan. The talk explains the history and archaeology behind the divergence in cultural trajectories between mainland Japan and Hokkaido, and the recent cultural revival following the 2007 recognition of the Ainu as Japan’s Indigenous people.

Watkins explains how Ainu culture developed differently from Japan’s Waijin ethnic majority culture: “On Hokkaido, the climate cannot allow wet rice agriculture, as was developed on the Japanese mainland on Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu in 5000 BC, as seen in the archaeology. So the Ainu on Hokkaido [and other northern islands] developed in place. So with that archaeological distinction as well as the genetic distinction from the Wajin of the mainland, we start getting the cultural differences, the historical differences, and we still see the expression of genetic differences in many Ainu.”

Watch the video here.

The event was presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center.

Joe E. Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, currently works as a senior consultant for Archaeological and Cultural Education Consultants (ACE Consultants) and is an affiliated faculty member in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was president of the Society for American Archaeology during 2019–2021. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.

Video: Ann Hedlund at Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society

Posted on June 4, 2026May 26, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

June 4, 2026

Ann Lane Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer A Southwest Maverick and Her Art, gave a talk to the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society on April 21, 2026, at the San Pedro Chapel in Tucson. In this richly illustrated talk, Ann draws from the artist’s letters, photo albums, and published reviews to tell the story of Mac’s creative and adventurous life in the Southwest, along with some of the Tucson anthropologists and artists she knew from the 1940s into the early 1960s.

Artist Mac (Mary Alice Cox) Schweitzer (1921-1962) was well known in the Tucson and Scottsdale art colonies of the mid-twentieth century. Mac’s close friends, mentors and patrons—many of whom were associated with the University of Arizona and anthropology or art—included Fred Kabotie and Charles Loloma. Mac’s prize-winning watercolors, oil paintings, prints, and sculptures ranged from naturalistic and stylized studies of Sonoran Desert animals to impressionistic landscapes to moody abstractions. A keen observer of Indigenous life, she sketched and painted scenes of the Navajo (Diné), Hopi, Zuni, O’odham, and Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples and events. She depicted Ancestral Puebloan sites at Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, and Navajo National Monument, and illustrated several books. At least one archaeological monograph contains many humorous as well as informative vignettes.

When reflecting on Mac Schweitzer, Hedlund said in her presentation, “Today I want to introduce you to an absolutely adventuring woman in love with the West from 75 years ago. . . You’re going to meet an amazing distinctive Tucson artist who becomes an interpreter of the Southwest during the mid-20th century and then disappears for almost 60 years. In short, we are rediscovering who this artist is to us in our time, and who she is to the art of the American West.”

Watch the video here.

Ann Lane Hedlund is a cultural anthropologist who collaborates with Indigenous weavers and other visual artists to understand creative processes in social contexts. From 1997 to 2013 she served as a curator at Arizona State Museum and professor at University of Arizona, Tucson, where she also directed the nonprofit Center for Tapestry Studies. She is author of Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century and Gloria F. Ross & Modern Tapestry, among other works.

The University of Arizona Press