Category: Author news

‘Discovering Mars’ Explored and Praised

Posted on January 8, 2022January 7, 2022 by Mari Herreras

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 So as a kid getting everything I could out of the branch library and all of the books being several years out of date.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.

Tohono O’odham Poet Ofelia Zepeda Delivers Keynote at Vaquero Awards Ceremony

Posted on December 23, 2021December 21, 2021 by Mari Herreras

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.

Author Esther G. Belin talks ‘Diné Reader’ on Native America Calling Radio Program

Posted on December 22, 2021December 21, 2021 by Mari Herreras

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.

Frederick Luis Aldama on MSNBC’s American Voices Talking ‘Marvel’s Voices: Communidades’

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Mari Herreras

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.

https://www.tiktok.com/@professorlatinx0/video/7043531131118947631?is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=7043900158992647686

https://www.tiktok.com/@professorlatinx0/video/7043563612245495086?is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=7043900158992647686

Urayoán Noel’s ‘Transversal’ on 2022 PEN Open Book Award Longlist

Posted on December 15, 2021December 15, 2021 by Mari Herreras

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.

Current Shares ‘Sound of Exclusion’ Excerpt on How NPR Overlooked Latinx Listeners

Posted on December 10, 2021December 9, 2021 by Mari Herreras

December 10, 2021

Current, a nonprofit news organization covering public media in the U.S for professionals in the industry, recently shared an excerpt of Christopher Chávez‘s The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

The Sound of Exclusion examines how National Public Radio conceptualizes the Latinx listener, arguing that NPR employs a number of industry practices that secure its position as a white public space while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. These practices are tied to a larger cultural logic. Latinx identity is differentiated from national identity, which can be heard through NPR’s cultivation of an idealized dialect, situating whiteness at its center. Pushing Latinx listeners to the edges of public radio has crucial implications for Latinx participation in civic discourses, as identifying who to include in the “public” audience necessarily involves a process of exclusion.

Here’s part of the excerpt from Current:

When I spoke with NPR’s Bill Siemering about how the network originally conceived of its listener, he affirmed that NPR was initially designed to serve ethnically diverse audiences. However, Siemering’s conception of diversity was centered primarily on Black and Indigenous communities. This orientation came largely from his own professional experiences. Siemering had previously served as general manager of college radio station WBFO-FM in Buffalo. There, he spent his first years at the station learning about the local community, conducting interviews with the African American community, which were used to develop a series called To Be Negro. Siemering also worked with Indigenous communities living at nearby Niagara Falls to produce a series of programs on the Iroquois Confederacy called Nation Within a Nation.

Siemering admitted that Latinxs were not much of a consideration when he wrote his mission statement, stating, “At that time, there wasn’t much awareness about Latinos.” This is to be expected. In 1970, when the network first aired, Latinxs accounted for only 4.5 percent of the total U.S. population.¹ But when I asked Siemering how a single network was meant to appeal to the broad spectrum of the nation, he stated that a unifying trait of NPR’s audience is curiosity. “Being curious is very important,” Siemering told me. “That cuts across all divides.”

The notion of curiosity has been a defining characteristic of the NPR audience over the course of its history and is reflected in the marketing materials NPR uses to sell its audiences to corporate underwriters. For example, NPR markets a number of products under its “Curious Listener” series, which educates listeners on how to appreciate music and culture. However, Siemering was firm in his belief that NPR should not consider the economic value of its listeners to be its paramount consideration. When we spoke, he read aloud a sentence in the mission statement that he felt was particularly important: “NPR would not regard its audience as a market.” Yet, this is exactly how the network regards the listener. The research conducted by Audience Research Analysis was designed to cultivate a listening audience that would support the network financially. This strategy has, in turn, informed how NPR conceives of, and pursues, its ideal Latinx listener.

Read the entire excerpt here.

Gustavo Arellano Includes ‘Rewriting the Chicano Movement’ in LA Times Column

Posted on December 2, 2021December 1, 2021 by Mari Herreras

December 1, 2021

In his recent Los Angeles Times column, “Mexicans have fought for a better California for 171 years. These books show how,” Gustavo Arellano highlights four books on Chicano and Mexican-American history in California, including Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era, edited by Mario T. García, and Ellen McCracken.

From Arellano:

The most moving chapter deals with el movimiento in Fresno County during the 1960s and 1970s, where students from rural towns across the Central Valley came to the big city for a college degree only to find a society out of the Deep South.

“What Mexicans encountered [there],” said author Patrick Fontes, “was an area wholly founded by whites for whites — they indeed entered a foreign land.”

But Chicanos persisted, and vowed to return to their hometowns to make them better. Today, the Central Valley is slowly turning politically purple, like grapes ripening on a vine.

Read the entire column here.

New York Public Library Includes ‘Transversal’ in Best Books of 2021 List

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Mari Herreras

November 29, 2021

Urayoán Noel’s Transversal was listed in the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2021.

Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. 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.

To read the entire Best of 2021 list, visit here.

New Books Network Interviews Michelle Téllez on ‘Border Women’

Posted on November 23, 2021November 21, 2021 by Mari Herreras

November 23, 2021

Michelle Téllez was recently interviewed by David-James Gonzales, assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University, on her new book, Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of an autonomous community near Tijuana and its struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

Téllez, an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona, writes about transnational community formations, Chicana feminism, and gendered migration.

Listen to the interview here.

Got ‘Hatak Witches’? Louise Erdrich Thinks You Should

Posted on November 22, 2021November 21, 2021 by Mari Herreras

Nov. 22, 2021

At the end of Louise Erdrich’s newest novel, The Sentence, is a page titled “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books.” Under the subtitle, “Ghost-Managing Book List,” are 15 books, and between Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto, and Beloved, by Tony Morrison is Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah.

Author shout outs to one another isn’t unusual, but that doesn’t mean this particular shoutout doesn’t need a bit of celebrating and thanks.

The Hatak Witches, published by the University of Arizona Press, follows Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson into an investigate which begins with a security guard found dead and another wounded at the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma. There are no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building. Blue Hawk, however, discovers that a portion of an ancient and deformed skeleton has also been stolen from the neglected museum archives. As this thriller unfolds, readers are introduced to Choctaw cosmology with the unexpected appearance and power of the Old Ones who guard the lands of the Choctaw afterlife.

The list of books in Erdrich’s novel isn’t the only nod of appreciation for Hatak Witches. In a recent interview on National Public Radio’s Here and Now, Erdrich refers to Mihesuah’s novel as “a compelling read.” Go here for listen, and head to minute 19:00 for Erdrich’s shoutout.

Thanks for the shoutout and the love! Erdrich, while a celebrate Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is co-owner of Birchbark Books, a Minneapolis-based independent bookstore that supports Indigenous authors and their books. During the pandemic, Birchbark helped us as a sponsor of several of our virtual events celebrating books from our Sun Tracks series, including The Hatak Witches. Thank you for the continued support!

Detective Blue Hawk recently received more adoration in The Arizona Daily Star, which included The Hatak Witches in a list of book recommendations from our friends at the Pima County Public Library of science fiction, fantasy, an horror books by Indigenous authors. Read the list here. An art blog, Sidetracks and Detours also included the book in a list of recommendations of book by Indigenous authors. That list is here.

The University of Arizona Press