The University of Arizona Press

March 19, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Anne Johnson author of Mexico in Space: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race. Anne Johnson is a professor in the graduate program in social anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Her research interests include the anthropology of outer space, the social studies of science, technology, and art, material culture, and performance studies.

When asked about how she became interested in the topic of Mexico in space, Johnson replied, “I took my daughter to a talk at UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] on dark energy, and the person who was giving the talk said that UNAM has an experiment on the International Space Station; UNAM has been in space. And this general idea kept coming up, that Mexico has this connection with space, and it became really interesting to me. I had just read Lisa Messeri’s book, Placing Outer Space, about how scientists in the United States turn outer spaces into outer places through cartography and meaning-making practices. And I thought what would it look like for outer space to contain Mexican places? How could I anthropologically investigate Mexico in outer space?”

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

About the book:

From Aztec sun stones to satellite launches, from muralist visions to dark sky parks, Mexico’s engagement with outer space is fundamental to its identity. Mexico in Space offers a groundbreaking look at how the country has navigated the tensions between technological dependence and sovereign dreams.
 
Anthropologist Anne W. Johnson reveals Mexico’s unique relationship with outer space, describing Indigenous knowledge, nationalist projects, artistic visions, and community practices. Through rich ethnographic detail and historical insight, Johnson challenges the notion that space is for everyone and shows whose voices truly shape the world’s cosmic futures. Johnson introduces us to satellite engineers, community astronomers, space generation youth, and artists imagining Mars, each crafting alternative cosmic futures.

March 18, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968.

When asked why he decided to explore this part of Mexican history through print culture, Zavala replied, “I wanted to focus specifically on how artists, photographers, print makers, intellectuals, and journalists printed collected subjectivities. These denote a common sense of belonging, and group members that share some sort of identity. . . . I wanted to see how the prints, the newspapers and the magazines really negotiated with phenomena that was going on in Mexico during and after the revolution: state formation, modernization, urbanization, political ideology, popular movements, state repression and worker exploitation.”

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

About the book:

Forging a Mexican People shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico.

Through meticulous research, Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people vis-à-vis different political and social categories. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Zavala’s research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors.

March 5, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons authors of The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story. Dorothy Denetclaw is Tótsohnii born for Tł’ááschí’í. She has lived in Indian Wells, Arizona, her whole life. Dorothy is a survivor of the U.S. government’s boarding school system. After studying business in college, she worked on community development projects across the Navajo Nation as an organizer, activist, and interpreter. Dorothy especially enjoys researching her family history, a legacy for her children and grandchildren. Matt Fitzsimons is a former newspaper reporter and the author of The Counterfeiters of Bosque Redondo: Slavery, Silver, and the U.S. War Against the Navajo Nation. He lives in San Diego, California, serves on the board of the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation, and is a member of the Diné Studies Conference, based in Window Rock, Arizona.

When asked about how she met Matt and decided to tell her family’s story in a book, Dorothy replied, “Throughout my childhood, my father was always telling stories about his family, and we would all sit and listen to him, and it was like watching a movie. I developed a passion to record his stories. Beginning in the 1990s, I teamed up with Navajo Times reporter Cindy Yurth to write my father’s stories and publish them in the Navajo Times. . . . Matt read the stories in the Navajo Times and contacted Cindy who called me and told me that Matt wanted to talk to me.”

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

About the book:

In 1919, the brother of one of the West’s most famous Indian traders was shot to death in a remote corner of the Navajo Nation.
 
Part history, part true crime, The Sons of Gunshooter reexamines the killing and subsequent murder trial, while simultaneously embedding the story in a much larger saga of colonization and resistance. The result is a book that’s sweeping in its scope and surgical in its approach. Rewinding the clock to 1868, the authors follow the intertwining paths of two families to offer a riveting, deeply personal account that has been hailed as “a new way of doing historiography.”
 
One of the authors is a descendant of participants in the case; the other is an investigative journalist. By merging Diné oral traditions with archival evidence, they succeed in upending one false narrative after another.

March 2, 2026

We are thrilled to announce that the City of Tucson, in partnership with the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, has appointed Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, as the 2026-2029 Tucson Poet Laureate!

The City of Tucson announcement describes the committee’s decision: “[Logan Phillips] frames poetry as an important tool for building connection and resilience amid current social and environmental challenges and describes laureateship as an honor in the city where he is raising his children. Selected by a seven-person panel of literary community members, Phillips was chosen for his experience, artistic strength, and leadership.”

Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.

As Poet Laureate, Phillips plans to launch the ¡Somos Uno! Poetry & Storytelling Series, a set of multilingual open mics with writing workshops in small businesses, libraries, and underused spaces to support citywide cultural initiatives and document Tucson’s evolving story. This series would be part of the City of Tucson’s ¡Somos Uno! A Cultural Heritage Strategy, a 2023 initiative to steward the City’s rich cultural heritage, jointly led by the Office of Mayor Regina Romero and the Office of the City Manager.

The Laureate will also give an inaugural reading at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 15 at 4:00 p.m. in the Student Union Kiva Room, appearing alongside Arizona’s newly appointed Poet Laureate, Laura Tohe, who was named to the post this year by Governor Katie Hobbs.

Congratulations Logan!

About Logan Phillips’ recently published hybrid memoir, Reckon:

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 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.