The University of Arizona Press

February 26, 2026

Native America Calling radio program “Indigenous Food News and Stories” features an interview with Kasey Jernigan author of Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity. Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She received her doctorate in medical anthropology and a graduate certificate in Native American Indigenous studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s in public health from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

When asked about how Jernigan connected specific life experiences to the food available to women named Linda and Sherry who she interviewed, Jernigan replied, “What we often call obesity or poor health isn’t just about individual choices, it’s deeply shaped by land loss, government food programs, poverty and historical trauma. . . . The stories show the connection between health and heritage. When the Choctaw women in chapter two talk about food or diabetes, they’re also talking about their families, land, history, and survival. Linda’s story reflects those everyday realities of care giving for her mother, poverty, and diabetes. Sherry is a dress-maker, she makes Choctaw dresses; and she’s literally watched bodies change over time as she sews traditional dresses. She’s been having to make the dresses larger and larger to accommodate larger bodies.”

Listen to the full radio program here; “Indigenous Food News and Stories” interview with Jernigan starts at minute 7:28 of the program.

About the book:

The term “commod bod” is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs.
 
In Commod Bods, Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly “obesity” and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
 
Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as “Food and Fellowship” and “Heritage, Embodied” center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making.

February 25, 2026

The Border Chronicle podcast features an interview with Logan Phillips author of Reckon. Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). He is author of Sonoran Strange, alongside numerous poetry chapbooks and art books. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.

When asked about how Reckon shifts between poetry and essays, Phillips replied, “I was really not interested in pre-determining the outcome. This book was about writing the questions, and not knowing [the format of the answers]. And in that not-knowing, I became very genre-agnostic and let the piece decide for itself if it wanted to use line breaks or if it was using paragraphs. Genre itself is part of the way we frame history: when we take complex human contradictory history and try to fit it into a Hollywood movie plot, there are going to be things that are left out of that inherently.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

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. 

February 16, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Jason Roberts author of We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea. Roberts is a practicing anthropologist who currently works on subsistence policy and natural resource management issues in Alaska. His work and research engages interests in development, sustainability, climate change, hope, and environmental justice.

When asked what drew him to the South Pacific and questions of political ecology, Roberts replied, “I got my undergraduate degree in forestry, but there were questions that I didn’t think we were asking. So that led me to the political ecology framework. . . . In graduate school, I learned about the special agriculture and business leases in Papua New Guinea, especially on New Hanover Island, and that sounded like the perfect topic to explore. . . . After doing some pilot research in 2012, things got rolling, and I found the topics from a theoretical perspective and humanistic perspective to be very interesting, and the Lavongai people were very welcoming.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book (now available in paperback):

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

February 12, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Allison Caine, author of Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands. Allison Caine is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Her research in Peru takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to understanding contemporary environmental problems in partnership with international and Indigenous citizen scientists. Her ongoing research program aims to understand diverse experiences of health and aging in changing landscapes in Peru and the United States.

When asked what drew her to follow the herders in the Andes and study them in the context of ecology, Caine replied, “So much of what we know about the earth’s climate comes from this part of the world. A few hours distance from where I work in Peru is the site of the Quelccaya Ice Cap. This is the site of an extensive climate science initiative where for decades, teams of scientists have been monitoring the earth’s climate . . . . So my primary goal was to write about climate change from the ground up: to go to this place that has generated so much knowledge and really understand how the people living there see the world, and see the world changing.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the past decade, however, these herders and their animals have traversed a rapidly shifting terrain.

Drawing on the Quechua concept of k’ita, or restlessness, Allison Caine explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart—when animals no longer listen to herders’ whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains—these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder’s world.

December 4, 2025

The Arizona Highways podcast features an interview with Ann Lane Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art. 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.

Asked about what is was like to chronicle the life of a person she had never met, Hedlund answered: “I lived with Mac artwork in my home . . . . I’m a cultural anthropologist who has worked with other artists my whole career, so I was used to watching artists. My fascination is in the artist’s process.” She approached Mac’s story as an anthropologist, as she said, “following the threads of the story.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

In Tucson during the 1950s, nearly everyone knew, or wanted to know, the southwestern artist Mac Schweitzer. Born Mary Alice Cox in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921, she grew up a tomboy who adored horses, cowboys, and art. After training at the Cleveland School of Art and marrying, she adopted her maiden initials (M. A. C.) as her artistic name and settled in Tucson in 1946. With a circle of influential friends that included anthropologists, designer-craftsmen, and Native American artists, she joined Tucson’s “Early Moderns,” receiving exhibits, commissions, and awards for her artwork. When she died in 1962, Mac’s artistic legacy faded from public view, but her prize-winning works attest to a thriving career.

Author Ann Lane Hedlund draws from the artist’s letters, photo albums, and published reviews to tell the story of Mac’s creative and adventuresome life.

November 24, 2025

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area. Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She calls herself a “1.5 immigrant” because she moved to the United States when she was a child. She is past president of the Latina/o Studies Association (2017–2019).

After analyzing the work of professional writers and artivists, Rodríguez concludes her book with the creative work of her students from digital storytelling projects. Asked about the inspiration to bring Entre Mundos / Between Worlds digital storytelling into her classroom, Rodríguez answered: “I wanted to find ways we could tell our stories based on personal archives. And of course, families have a lot of pictures. So I wanted to find a way to use those photos we have in our albums, as well as the sounds we could capture and put into video. I had recorded sounds in El Salvador that I couldn’t hear in the United States; sounds like the songs of birds, sounds of the ocean, the sounds of parakeets flying at five o’clock in San Salvador. So I wanted my students to learn how to combine these types of images and sounds to create a story in a short amount of time, because with digital storytelling, you only have three to five minutes.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community.

In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.