Category: Author news

Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration wins 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award

Posted on November 15, 2022November 15, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

November 15, 2022

We are thrilled that Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration by Keri Vacanti Brondo is the winner of the 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group! The committee noted: This is a remarkable book that moves beyond the study of human tourism on the island of Utila (Honduras) to examine how other species exhibit/display/articulate alternative values to life and death. By de-centering the experiences of individual voluntourists, she foregrounds collaboration as a basis for conservation while also paying close attention to the neoliberal structure of voluntourism and the intersections of questions of race, gender, and whiteness on the island. The book is extremely well-written, weaving together ethnographic vignettes, local histories, oral narratives, fiction, and social media postings. Dr. Brondo combines a sophisticated theoretical analysis and a detailed review of relevant literature with a well-told story. In sum, this is an excellent book which committee members agree is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate discussions.

Congratulations, Keri!

Vox.com Features Interview with John Fleck

Posted on October 14, 2022October 13, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

October 14, 2022

Vox.com recently featured Science Be Dammed and an interview with author John Fleck and Benji Jones in their article “How a 100-year-old miscalculation drained the Colorado River”.

“…this was a stunning revelation for me. The very bottom of the river, where it leaves the United States and enters Mexico, used to be this vast delta — wild and wet and full of beavers and marshes and estuaries. But the river now stops at a place called Morelos Dam, on the US-Mexico border. Downstream from the dam there’s a little trickle of water that’s maybe 10 to 15 feet wide, and then it peters out into the sand. Then you just have dry riverbed. That’s because we’ve taken all the water out of the river upstream to use in our cities and farms.”
John Fleck

Read the entire article here.

Esther Belin Accepts Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Award for The Diné Reader

Posted on October 11, 2022October 11, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

October 11, 2022

Esther Belin accepted the Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Award for The Diné Reader at their virtual awards ceremony on October 9, 2022 on behalf of the editors and contributors to the volume. You can watch her acceptance speech below. Congratulations to all of the editors and contributors to this incredible work!

NPR’s Books We Love Featured ‘Book of Wanderers’

Posted on August 31, 2022August 29, 2022 by Mari Herreras

August 31, 2022

National Public Radio’s Books We Love recently featured Reyes Ramirez‘s The Book of Wanders on its Best Books 2022 list.

On Wanderers:

It’s tempting to describe the tales in this masterful debut collection of short stories as both of and for our current moment. But this painterly illumination of culture, heritage, language and humanity isn’t of the zeitgeist; rather, it tells a profound truth about the many realities constituting Latino/a/Hispanic life in the Americas. Hop on the surrealist bus to understanding that Reyes Ramirez conjures for us, and you’ll hear echoes of Dashiell Hammett, Gabriel García Márquez and Alfonsina Storni. But ultimately, Ramirez’s short story collection is singular, and the real deal.

Read the entire list here.

‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-editor Julies Swarstad Johnson Talks Stars and Poetry with Lowell Observatory

Posted on August 16, 2022August 11, 2022 by Mari Herreras

August 16, 2022

The Lowell Observatory’s Star Stuff Podcast recently featured an interview with University of Arizona Press co-editor and poet Julie Swarstad Johnson, who recently served as Lowell Observatory’s Poet in Residence this summer.

Swarstad Johnson is co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, a trailblazing anthology of poetry that spans from the dawn of the space age to the imagined futures of the universe. The anthology offers a fascinating record of both national mindsets and private perspectives as poets grapple with the promise and peril of U.S. space exploration across decades and into the present. Tracing an arc of literary skepticism during the Apollo era and before to a more curious, and even hopeful, stance today, Beyond Earth’s Edge includes diverse perspectives from poets such as Robert Hayden, Rae Armantrout, N. Scott Momaday, Adrienne Rich, Tracy K. Smith, Ray Bradbury, May Swenson, Pablo Neruda, and many other engaging poetic voices.

Listen to the interview here.

August 12, 2022

EcoTheo Collective recently featured an interview with The Book of Wanderers‘ author Reyes Ramirez on his debut short story collection, Houston, and writing life.

From the interview:

Each story presented its own challenges and joys. The earliest stories were completed about 9 years ago when I was about 23 years old, an incredibly different writer and person than I am now but still holds a spirit of rebellion and passion that I’ve honed a bit more since, I hope. The latest stories were completed about 3 or 4 years ago, before I turned 30, but still a person honing language and narrative. I guess this all to say that the idea of accomplishment has changed so much within the context of this collection that I oscillate between a grand feeling of success for making it this far and utter disgust of what I’d written at such an elementary level in the larger scope of my career. Obviously, the joy wins out or else I wouldn’t be doing this!

Read the entire interview here.

NYT Magazine Recently Featured ‘Sister Song’ By Casandra López

Posted on July 29, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 26, 2022

Casandra López‘s poem “Sister Song,” from her collection Brother Bullet published by the University of Arizona Press, was recently featured in New York Times Magazine.

Poet Victoria Chang, who selected the poem, had this to say about the format of “Sister Song”:

The ghazal is a formal poem that has roots in seventh-century Arabia and was often sung by musicians. The poet Agha Shahid Ali introduced the form to America. “Ghazal” literally means “the cry of a gazelle” as it is being chased and about to die. Like many formal poems such as the sonnet, the ghazal, with its restrictions, can paradoxically illuminate and parse difficult emotions. In López’s poem, the emotion is grief — a longing for and memory of a murdered brother. This poem mostly follows the parameters of a ghazal with its repeated end word, “song,” and the inside rhyme of “forever,” “far,” “marred,” etc., as well as the poet’s name or reference to the poet (“Sister”) in the final line. One way this poem breaks the rules is that each couplet doesn’t stand alone as if it were its own poem. Instead, the end of the couplets often bleed into the next stanza, linking the narratives.

Read the entire poem here.

Poem from Raquel Salas Rivera’s ‘x/ex/exis’ Used in Pride Month Event Celebrating Brahms

Posted on July 27, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 27, 2022

Byron Schenkman and Friends’ Pride Month event, “A Double Portrait: Johannes Brahms & Jonathan Woody”, premiered on June 26. This concert, an intimate, Pride-friendly celebration of Brahms’ music, features two of Jonathan Woody’s works, including the world premiere of ‘nor shape of today’ for voice, viola, and piano set to text by poet Raquel Salas Rivera from his Ambroggio Prize-winner x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación.

Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation.

From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

For more on the celebration:

Here is the concert:

Congratulations to Carmen Giménez on New Position with Graywolf Press

Posted on July 22, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 21, 2022

Carmen Giménez has been named Graywolf Press’s new executive director and publisher, succeeding Fiona McCrae, who retired after leading the press for 28 years.

Giménez has published three poetry collections with the University of Arizona Press: Bring Down the Little Birds, Milk and Filth, and Odalisque in Pieces.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Giménez, 51, a queer Latinx poet and editor, holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. She is a professor in the English department at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, where she teaches creative writing in the MFA program.

She was also, until recently, publisher of Noemi Press, which announced on July 5 that Giménez was stepping down 20 years after she and Evan Lavender-Smith founded the press in 2002 with the release of a single chapbook. Noemi’s mission is to promote both emerging voices and established writers with an emphasis on writers from under-represented communities, including women, BIPOC writers, and LGBTQ writers. Noemi Press, a nonprofit organization, now publishes eight books each year in the fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism categories. Its authors have been winners of, and finalists for, such awards as the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Lambda Literary Awards.

Graywolf published Giménez’s most recent collection of poetry, Be Recorder, in 2019. Be Recorder was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN/Open Book Award, the Audré Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Giménez also is the author of five other collections of poetry, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her lyric memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, won an American Book Award.

Read the entire announcement here.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Features ‘Science Be Dammed’

Posted on July 15, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 15, 2022

On the June 26, 2022 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River by Eric Kuhn, and John Fleck was featured in a segment on water shortage in the American west.

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States. It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

The University of Arizona Press