Category: Author news

‘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.

Professor Latinx Looks at Problems with Censorship in Comics and Literature

Posted on July 5, 2022June 28, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 5, 2022

In a recent issue of Hispanic Outlook on Education Magazine, Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, wrote a call to action to preventing the damage caused by the growing censorship of comics and literature.

Aldama is co-editor of the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series, and is editor of one it’s newest titles, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, which offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities.

Here’s an excerpt from Aldama’s article on censorship:

As I wrap this up, I remind readers of the urgency of our call to action as Latinx educators and others – librarians, familia, and members of the broader community. Over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed the inching forward of more Latinx fiction and nonfiction in the form of comics and prose, making it to library shelves and K-12 and college classroom desks. Yet, such books are still few and far between, hovering in the low single percentages of the total amount of books published every year. And yet, at 19% of the total US population, we are the majority of historically underrepresented people in this country. The banning of the few Latinx books we have managed to get into our learning and exploring spaces will quickly result in our total absence from these spaces.

So, when librarians and teachers are forced to remove from shelves and desks books like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, House on Mango Street, Always Running, Bless Me, Ultima, Poet X, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, and In the Dream House, among many Latinx titles that have been banned in different regions and districts across the land, what becomes cemented in their place is fear, prejudice, rigidity of thought, and the notion of who belongs and who doesn’t.

Let’s follow our common sense and science. Let’s listen to those like Bertrand Russell, who already nearly a century ago in Education and the Good Life, asked adults to be open and honest with youth about all matters, including taboo and stigmatized subjects. Let’s stop thinking of young people as passive absorptive sponges and as snowflakes easily crushed. Let’s stop acting from fear that forecloses possibilities. And let’s start thinking and treating young people as they are: actively engaged and active recreators of the world. That is, let’s act with intelligence, courage, and creativity. Let’s stand with our fellow educators and librarians to continue to open creative spaces that allow all youth to explore and grow fluid, messy, exuberant, complex patterns of thought, behaviors, identities, and experiences that will lead to their innovating in the areas of literature, art, science, and technology.

Read the entire article here.

Raquel Salas Rivera’s ‘x/ex/exis’ Poetry Collection a Lambda Literary Finalist

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Mari Herreras

June 13, 2002

We are proud to announce that poet Raquel Salas Rivera‘s collection, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems, was chosen as a 2022 Lambda Literary Awards finalist.

Salas Rivera’s book was the first Ambroggio Prize winner from the Academy of American Poets, a $1,000 publication award given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with and English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press. Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish.

Salas Rivera’s x/ex/exis was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards competition in the Transgender Poetry category. The book was written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition. 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.

UT Austin’s Life & Letters Tells Origin Story of Latinx Pop Culture’s Professor Latinx

Posted on May 31, 2022May 31, 2022 by Mari Herreras

May 31, 2022

Life & Letters, the official magazine for University of Texas Austin’s College of Liberal Arts recently published a deep dive into University of Arizona Press author and editor Frederick Luis Aldama.

In “The Pilgrimage of Professor Latinx” Frederick Luis Aldama and the Making of an Academic Superhero,” Emily Nielsen goes from Aldama’s early childhood to his love scholarship, and of course, Latinx pop culture.

Aldama is the co-editor of the Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series. Its most recent title, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Aldama, argues that Latinx TV is not just television—it’s an entire movement. Digital spaces and streaming platforms today have allowed for Latinx representation on TV that speaks to Latinx people and non-Latinx people alike, bringing rich and varied Latinx cultures into mainstream television and addressing urbanization, immigration, family life, language, politics, gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.

Here’s an excerpt from the Life & Letters feature:

At the heart of Aldama’s work is the belief that academic scholarship has an essential role to play in the growth and health of the field of Latino comics. It is not just about reading and critiquing the work of writers and artists, but also legitimizing them and their field. This extends beyond comics to other media as well. Film and television, in particular, have been abiding interests. He’s published two books on the Austin-based film director Robert Rodriguez and is currently working on two books on Latinx TV.

“Wherever I can, I try to bring to these spaces the cultural gravitas, or cultural capital, of being a Ph.D. and a professor with an endowed chair,” Aldama said. “The artists don’t necessarily need it to find readers, but it’s like your art being pulled into a space like the Smithsonian. Suddenly more people are going to take it seriously as art, as some- thing carefully crafted to make a difference in the world.”

As a Latino kid growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Aldama didn’t often see people like himself in the media he absorbed. “Growing up, we didn’t have a TV at home, so it was at my abuelita’s that we would watch TV,” Aldama said. “We would spend the night on a Friday, and as a treat on Saturday she would let us watch cartoons. I remember very vividly Speedy Gonzales was one of the few representations. I didn’t know at the time how bad that representation was. There’s Slowpoke Rodriguez, his cousin, who seems totally stoned all the time. And Speedy, what is he doing? He’s a master thief.”

To read the entire interview go here.

*Illustration of Aldama in the image of Marvel’s Professor X. By J. Gonzo

KUOW NPR Continues ‘Sound of Exclusion’ Conversation in Interview with Christopher Chávez

Posted on May 2, 2022April 27, 2022 by Mari Herreras

May 2, 2022

Christopher Chávez sat down recently with KUOW NPR’s Soundside host Libby Denkmann to discuss his new book, The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

From Soundside:

Chavez explains that as radio grew to become widely used, it immediately went heavily commercial, despite some organizations and universities producing educational content.

“You had a framework of educational radio, these smaller systems that were meant to serve a social good … The 1967 Radio Broadcasting Act was meant to ensure some kind of framework for these stations. They would provide some sort of funding to basically serve a need that commercial radio couldn’t. They would do it through civic discourses, they would serve disenfranchised publics. They were meant to serve as an alternative to the commercial radio system.”

But Professor Chavez notes that, often, the most educated, socially connected, and people with cultural and economic capital have had easy access to the public media system.

“Even today, those are the folks that tend to be overrepresented in political discourses … so you have the people that are living in rural areas, that are poor, that are ethnic minorities, that are often not included in those kinds of civic discourses.”

To listen to the full conversation, go here.

The University of Arizona Press