February 3, 2022
Abalone Mountain Press Podcast interviewed Esther Belin, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, published by the University of Arizona Press. Also interviewed were Byron Aspaas, Nia Francisco and Laura Tohe. Together they discussed what it is like growing up on the Navajo Reservation, writing poems in Navajo, and hopes for The Diné Reader.
Listen to the podcast here.
February 3, 2022
University of Arizona Press author and editor Frederick Luis Aldama will be inducted in the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) at the organization’s annual meeting and banquet in El Paso, Texas on April 22-23, 2022. The event will also include the Annual TIL Literary Awards.
Founded in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievement, TIL’s membership consists of the state’s most respected writers–including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Academy Award, Americas Award, International Latino Book Award, Lambda Literary Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.
Membership is based on ongoing and exceptional literary accomplishment. Aldama is one of 15 new members approved for 2022 fiction and nonfiction authors.
Sergio Troncoso, president of the Texas Institute of Letters states, “The Texas Institute of Letters continues to identify and honor outstanding writers from all literary genres. Our newest members have expanded literary audiences to include diverse voices and readers, and have opened minds with books that reconsider history and scholarship. We are extremely proud of the outstanding work that these writers represent: children’s stories full of empathy and humor, poetry that breaks open the heart to imagine new perspectives, prose that challenges narrative forms and explores
psychological complexities, and publishing that finds and amplifies voices on the margins of society. These fifteen masters of the word include novelists, short-story writers, poets, memoirists, publishers, children’s authors, and scholars.”
Aldama is the author of over forty books, which he has authored, co-authored, and edited, including Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands and Eisner Award-winner Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, both published by the University of Arizona Press. Aldama is also co-editor of the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture Series.
In his newest book with the Press, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward. TV narratives by and about Latinx people exist across all genres. In this century, we see Latinx people in sitcoms, sci-fi, noir, soap operas, rom-coms, food shows, dramas, action-adventure, and more. Latinx people appear in television across all formats, from quick webisodes, to serialized big-arc narratives, to animation and everything in between. The diverse array of contributors to this volume delve into this rich landscape of Latinx TV from 2000 to today, spanning the ever-widening range of genres and platforms.
February 2, 2022
Reyes Ramirez’s The Book of Wanders is No. 10 on the Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books.
The Book of Wanderers deeply explores Houston, a Gulf Coast metropolis that incorporates Southern, Western, and Southwestern identities near the borderlands with a connection to the cosmos. As such, each story becomes increasingly further removed from our lived reality, engaging numerous genres from emotionally touching realist fiction to action-packed speculative fiction, as well as hallucinatory realism, magical realism, noir, and science fiction.
To read the entire list from Latinos in Publishing, go here.
February 1, 2022
Esther G. Belin, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, was featured in the sixth and final episode of Season Two of The Empty Chair from PEN South Africa.
The conversation included PEN South Africa president Nadia Davids and Toni Giselle Stuart, a South African poet, performer and educator. Her work includes Krotoa-Eva’s Suite in collaboration with filmmaker Kurt Orderson; I Come to My Body as a Question with dotdotdot dance and forgetting. and memory with vangile gantsho & Vusumzi Ngxande.
Belin, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and lives on the Colorado side of the 4 corners region, has two poetry collections, From the Belly of My Beauty, and Of Cartography, all published by the University of Arizona Press.
To learn more about the podcast, Pen South African, and listen to the podcast, visit here.
January 28, 2022
In “Adios, Big Jim: Saying Goodbye to the Man Who Stirred Tucson’s Melting Pot,” the Tucson Weekly recently honored the life and work of the late University of Arizona Press author James S. Griffith.
Friends and colleagues shared stories, including University of Arizona Press author and editor Noma E. Cantú:
My world would’ve been different had I not been blessed with meeting Jim Griffith. I learned from him; he supported my work; and offered advice when I didn’t even know I needed it.
One memorable trip across to Sonora began in Nogales, Arizona. I am a border dweller from Texas, but I didn’t know the Arizona-Sonora border and despite having close friends and family in Nogales, I had not ventured south of Nogales until I went with Big Jim. His encyclopedic knowledge of the folklore of the region was almost as rich as his love for the land and the people. On that memorable trip, I met some of the folks he had been working with for decades, learned about particular folk saints from that borderland, like Malverde—he had been working on what would become his book Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits, and Healers (2003)—and I learned of his penchant for telling tall tales.
He could sure spin a yarn and only an experienced raconteur would notice the glimmer in his eye that signaled you were in for a treat! Most people believed him until his grin would turn to laughter as the listener figured out Jim had been telling a tall tale.
At American Folklore Society (AFS) meetings, he would jam with the best of them, deliver brilliant papers with powerful images, and chat with budding folklorists, listening intently and offering sources from his vast knowledge. I remember such a conversation after a paper I delivered on the Texas border saints sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
His and Loma’s home filled with folk objects and books was a welcoming space for many of us and he never tired of sharing his space and his stories. I will miss him at AFS, and on my infrequent visits to Tucson.
Read the entire tribute here.
Here’s a video by Abraham Cooper with excerpts from his final conversation Jim Griffith on August 12, 2021:
January 8, 2022
Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet, by William Sheehan and Jim Bell, was recently featured on the Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio podcast, and reviewed by Leonard David’s Inside Outer Space.
From the Planetary Radio interview:
Mat Kaplan: I already shared what Bill Nye said about the book. Here’s a quote from our friend, Andy Chaikin, the author of the Man in the Moon. “Read and understand why we will never be done with Mars,” which is a short and sweet, I would say. Bill, I think you and I got our first small telescopes in the same mid-’60s year and we both immediately turned them toward the Red Planet. Did that begin your passion for Mars?
Bill Sheehan: Certainly did. I mean, Mars was the main act really back then as in many ways it still lives. So as a kid getting everything I could out of the branch library and all of the books being several years out of date. So the idea that Mars might still be inhabited even by intelligent beings had not completely been exorcized from our imagination. So I was a believer at the time in the canals of Mars and had hoped against hope that that might all pan out. I certainly remember looking at Mars through a small telescope, one of those department store telescopes that everybody pretty much says they’re worthless. But tell that to a kid of about 10 and seeing that little red disc up there, even though it was little bit bigger than a pin’s head, it still was infinitely evocative to the imagination. So, yeah, that was 1965, March 1965. That was the opposition I got started.
Mat Kaplan: Just about the time I got my little department store refractor and that belief, that wanting to believe in the canals of Mars and that we might just find somebody up there to welcome us. That is a theme that runs through this book, how belief sometimes got in the way almost… Well, right from the start of the science, of the actual facts about the planet Mars. Jim, do you also see that thread?
Jim Bell: Yeah, absolutely. And it really starts with Bill taking the historical perspective and part of this book is an update to Bill’s book from ’96, I want to say. Yeah.
Mat Kaplan: ’96. Right. The Planet Mars?
Jim Bell: The Planet Mars. Yeah. A lot has happened since then, of course, on the mission side, but a lot has happened on the historical side as well. Lots of research, lots of new photos and manuscripts uncovered, et cetera. And so yes, that thread of belief winds all the way through the historical side that Bill has researched so expertly and you know, it also runs through the spacecraft side. Right. We wanted to believe that the ALH84001 meteorite was loaded with Martian micro fossils. Some people want to believe there are human faces carved into the rocks of Mars. Right? Some people want to believe that we can do sample return in the next decade. Right? You know? And so yes, there’s scientific facts. Yes, there’s engineering reality, but yes, it’s also a very human endeavor, this exploration of Mars.
To listen to the entire interview, please visit here.
Space journalist Leonard David recently offered this praise and more on Discovering Mars:
“This epic and one-of-a-kind volume is best read with a mind in full-inquisitive mode and why our technologies have provided decade-after-decade of astounding and captivating reveals … and what awaits us.”
Read the entire review here.
December 23, 2021
Tohono O’odham poet and University of Arizona linguistics professor Ofelia Zepeda recently delivered the keynote speech at Central Arizona College’s Vaquero Awards, given to college alum who’ve made an impact within the community.
According to the Casa Grande Dispatch, Zepeda read two poems, and shared the value education had on her and her family:
“Sometimes I think that maybe I’m not supposed to be here,” Zepeda said. “I tell myself, ‘You shouldn’t have made it.’ That’s always the type of conflict I have. I’m still in disbelief sometimes. It’s a miracle, I believe in miracles.”
Read the entire story here.
December 22, 2022
Tara Gatewood, producer and host of Native America Calling, recently interviewed Diné multimedia artist and writer Esther G. Belin about The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature.
Belin is one of four editors of this powerful new anthology of Navajo literature with a range of contributors including Shonto Begay, Sherwin Bitsui, Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, and many others.
Listen to the interview here.
December 21, 2021
Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor LatinX, recently shared the small-screen with writer Daniel José Older on the MSNBC show American Voices hosted by Alicia Menendez to talk about Marvel Comics’ Marvel’s Voices: Communidades, a one-shot in the groundbreaking Marvel’s Voices series highlighting the cultural richness of Marvel Comics and uplifting new voices in the comic book industry. Communidades turns the spotlight to Latinx heroes and creators from the Marvel Universe.
Aldama, author of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, the 2018 Eisner Award Winner for Best Scholarly/Academic Work, wrote the issue’s introduction about the history of Latinx heroes and creators in the comic book industry. Older is featured in the issue, revisiting the legacy of Marvel’s first super hero of Latino descent, Hector Ayala aka White Tiger, in an inspiring story rooted in real history.
Aldama is co-editor of the University of Arizona Press Latinx Pop Culture series. The series, which includes Latinx Superheroes among many other award-winning titles, aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption, as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
December 15, 2021
We are thrilled to announce that Urayoán Noel‘s poetry collection, Transversal, has been selected for the Longlist of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award. Finalists will be announced in early 2022 and the winner will be honored at the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony.
“These Longlists are a ‘who’s who’ of the most exceptional writers of our generation and the next,” said Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, senior director of literary programs at PEN America. “Reading their names evokes memories of some of our all-time favorite works that brought us comfort during this strange year.”
Transversal takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics. Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.
The Longlists represent 11 PEN America literary awards. The PEN Open Book Award, formerly the Beyond Margins Awards, invites book submissions by authors of color, published in the United States during the applicable calendar year. The Open Book Award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. Works of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, poetry, and other works of literary character are strongly preferred.
From Pen America:
In an era of publishing consolidation, more than half (53 percent) of the longlisted titles come from independent and university presses. Almost a quarter come from small independent publishers (12 percent) and university presses (nine percent).
“Our Longlists highlight the groundbreaking and vital work produced by independent publishers, many of which continue to face significant challenges in today’s publishing market,” Shariyf said. “These publishers are often leaders in promoting diverse voices and stories not just along racial and gender lines, but showcasing cultural and geographic diversity, too. The Awards ceremony allows writers and publishers to gather with readers and champions of creative free expression and celebrate the power of storytelling as an inclusive literary community.”
Check out all literary award Longlists, including the Open Book Award, here. You can also read the press release here.
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