Category: Author news

Amber McCrary Receives Phoenix Art Grant

Posted on January 9, 2025January 9, 2025 by maryreynolds

January 9, 2025

The City of Phoenix awarded Amber McCrary a 2025 Artist to Work grant. The Artists to Work grant program supports the creation and presentation of original, new, or in-process artistic work by practicing Phoenix artists. McCrary’s project focuses on rez dogs and their significance in Native communities, with plans to create a dedicated zine.

“Central to this project is my dog, Sandy McCrary, whom I adopted from the Coconino Humane Society in Flagstaff, Arizona,” says McCrary. “I also want to highlight several rez dogs I fostered through the Tuba City Humane Society over a nine-month period. These dogs include those who were abandoned and homeless near the local high school, a puppy found lost under a work trailer and two brother puppies found at my grandma’s sheep camp.”

McCrary is the author of Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert. McCrary is of the Kin Łichíí’nii clan, born for the Naakaii Dine’é clan. Her maternal grandfather is the Áshįįhí clan and her paternal grandfather is the Ta’neeszahnii clan. She is a poet, zinester, dog (and cat) mom, and tea lover.

In Blue Corn Tongue, McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place.

Congratulations, Amber!

Authors on Podcasts and Radio

Posted on December 19, 2024December 20, 2024 by maryreynolds

December 19, 2024

Treat yourself to some excellent listening to celebrate the end of the year. Recently, our authors were featured guests or guest hosts on radio programs and podcasts. Tune in to go behind the scenes of three of our 2024 books, and listen to a brand new poem from one of our poets!

Phoenix’s KJZZ public radio station interviewed Rafael A Martínez about his new book, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States. Martínez talked about how today’s youth movements were inspired by the history of activism. He says, “Most of these activists that I write about were trained by folks and leaders in the civil rights movement. [In the 1960s] there was a lot of civil disobedience in the country, but then they also had to push politicians to pass things that would actually make significant change. Undocumented youth took a page from that history book and started to say: we need to take our activism to sites and places like detention centers where undocumented communities are being criminalized and we need to change the narrative.” Listen to the radio show here. The full transcript is also available.

Rick Tabenunaka of the “Decolonized Buffalo” podcast interviewed Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, authors of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State. The authors talk about Westphalian sovereignty and its Eurocentric roots, in comparison to Indigenous sovereignty. Canessa and Picq also discuss the concept of “tribalism” within a Eurocentric concept of sovereignty, and they also analyze the “Doctrine of Discovery” as a pillar of the modern political system. Listen to the podcast here or watch the video here.

Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, was guest host on the “Poetry Centered” podcast. He introduced three poems from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive. Báez discusses poems by Gabriel Dozal, Gabriel Palacios, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Then he reads a new poem of his own “Neuropathy with Lamb.” Listen to the podcast here.

“Imagine Otherwise” podcast host Cathy Hannabach interviewed Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda, editors of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with the Mujeres de Maiz organization and the collective liberation the group is building. Traversing poetry, performance, zines, healing ceremonies, visual art, autoethnography, and a plethora of other mediums, these scholars demonstrate the power of collaboration and intersectional solidarity. Listen to the podcast here.

Diego Báez on 2024 “Best of” Lists

Posted on December 11, 2024December 9, 2024 by maryreynolds

December 11, 2024

Yaguareté White by poet Diego Báez, appears on several end-of-year “best of” lists. Starting in the United Kingdom, Leo Boix of The Morningstar Online chose it as one of the “2024 Best Books by Latinx and Latin American Authors.” Boix wrote, “Yaguarete White by Latinx poet Diego Báez, was one of my favourite poetry books of the year. The book evokes Guaraní mythology through personal narratives and migrant experiences, skillfully weaving a tapestry of cultural appreciation and diasporic resonances. Baez uses Paraguayan Guarani, Spanish, and English to create a multilayered poetic world where the jaguar reigns supreme in all its forms.” Also, Rigoberto Gonzalez, editor of the University of Arizona Press’s Camino del Sol series, made this Best Books list with his edited volume: Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology.

Báez’s book was also included in Debutiful‘s list of “The Best Debut Poetry of 2024.” They wrote, “This is an eloquent and introspective collection that explores diaspora, belonging, and heritage. The poems are beautifully written and also pack a bite to them with a sprinkling of absurdist and humor.”

Yaguareté White is a finalist for two awards in the Chicago area. The Chicago Review of Books placed the book on the poetry shortlist for the CHIRBy Award. The CHIRBy Awards honor the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short essays and stories that feature Chicago and its strong literary community. The winners will be announced on December 12. Chicago Reader Magazine also nominated Yaguareté White for “Best new poetry collection by a Chicagoan” award. If you loved this book, you can vote for Báez here.

What a great collection of lists—congratulations, Diego!

“Discovering Mars” Author on History Channel Podcast

Posted on December 10, 2024November 18, 2024 by maryreynolds

December 10, 2024

William Sheehan, co-author with Jim Bell of Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet, was interviewed on the History Channel podcast. Ben Dickstein of the History Channel interviewed Sheehan from within the dome of the Clark Refractor at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Kevin Schindler, historian of the Lowell Observatory, was also interviewed.

They spoke about Mariner 9, an American space probe, that has been orbiting Mars for the last year. But now, it’s running out of fuel and will be deactivated, having met all of its mission objectives. Mariner 9 gave us our closest look ever at the Red Planet, solving mysteries that have been debated for centuries.

Listen to “Breaking the Mars Curse” here on Apple or here on Spotify.

About the book:

Historian William Sheehan and astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell combine their talents to tell a unique story of what we’ve learned by studying Mars through evolving technologies. What the eye sees as a mysterious red dot wandering through the sky becomes a blurry mirage of apparent seas, continents, and canals as viewed through Earth-based telescopes. Beginning with the Mariner and Viking missions of the 1960s and 1970s, space-based instruments and monitoring systems have flooded scientists with data on Mars’s meteorology and geology, and have even sought evidence of possible existence of life-forms on or beneath the surface. This knowledge has transformed our perception of the Red Planet and has provided clues for better understanding our own blue world.

2024 Booklist Editors Choice: They Call You Back

Posted on December 4, 2024December 4, 2024 by maryreynolds

December 4, 2024

They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, by Tim Z. Hernandez has been selected by Booklist as a 2024 Editors Choice Title! Booklist is the book review journal of the American Library Association. In the Booklist starred review of the book, Lillian Liao wrote, “Hernandez courageously embraces the fragility of stories and generously shares their underlying worldviews, allowing readers to touch the invisible. Anchored by grief, this is a must-read to understand a solemn part of America’s modern history that is still very present.”

They Call You Back is a memoir about the investigations that have shaped the greater part of the author’s life. Hernandez takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. Hernandez continues his search for families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.

Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. His books include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award. His work has been featured in international media, and in 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his work locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos, which is chronicled in his book, All They Will Call You.

Congratulations Tim!

Meena Khandelwal and “Cookstove Chronicles” on Jugaand Project Podcast

Posted on October 24, 2024October 23, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 24, 2024

Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? Meena Khandelwal, Associate Professor of Feminist Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Iowa, explores this paradox in her new book Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India. Based on multidisciplinary collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, development specialists, and others, Khandelwal discusses chulhas as women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work.

In The Jugaad Project: Material Religion in Context podcast, Khandelwal explains the questions that led to her research: “Why do these old technologies persist? Why does the chulha persist? I believe that re-imagining the chulha as a dynamic technology helps us understand the reasons that people and especially rural women may retain older technologies . . . despite the allure of modern energy infrastructures.”

The author also addressed the multidisciplinary aspect of the book: “We’re all trying to have a conversation. The language that we use is very different. The methods in each discipline are different. What counts as reliable data?” For example, the engineers wanted GIS data on forests and harvesting wood, with women’s stories as narratives about that data. But as an anthropologist, Kehandelwal believes women’s words and stories were the actual data. She said, “I pushed back at that moment and said stories are data too, not just embellishment of so-called ‘hard data.’”

Listen to the entire podcast interview here.

About the book:

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.

Author Rafael Martínez Receives Líderes Under 40 Award

Posted on October 15, 2024October 10, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 15, 2024

Congratulations to author Rafael Martínez, who has received the “Líderes Under 40 Award” from the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los D-backs Hispanic Council. The award honors leadership in Arizona’s Hispanic community.

Martínez was recently interviewed by Scott Bordow of Arizona State University News about the honor, which recognizes Martinez’s 2023 oral history project Querencia: Voices from Chandler’s Latinx Barrios. They also discussed Martinez’s new book Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, and the Latinx Oral History Lab.

Martínez tells Bordow, “The questions are framed around the idea of querencia. It’s a common Spanish word that means love to place. It’s terminology that’s been developed by Latino and Hispanic Southwest authors. Mexican Americans and people of Spanish descent have been in this region for multiple generations. The idea of connection to place is embodied in this concept of querencia. So, the questions really revolve around talking about growing up in the city of Chandler. What did the city look like at that time? What did their neighborhood look like?”

In the photo above, Rafael Martínez and his daughter are on the left with other award winners at Diamondbacks’ stadium.

Read the full interview here.

About the book:

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”

2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Winners

Posted on October 14, 2024February 25, 2025 by Cameron Quan

October 14, 2024

We’re celebrating two of our books that were recently selected as winners for the 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards!

The New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards are given annually by the New Mexico Book Co-op. Their mission is “to showcase local books, authors, presses, and related professionals; to promote literacy; and to raise public awareness of quality books produced [in New Mexico and Arizona].”

See the full list of winners at this link.

About the award-winning books:

Award Winner: Biography (Arizona Subject)

World of Our Mothers captures the largely forgotten history of courage and heartbreak of forty-five women who immigrated to the United States during the era of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel reveal how these women in the early twentieth century reconciled their lives with their circumstances—enduring the violence of the Revolution, experiencing forced labor and lost childhoods, encountering enganchadores (labor contractors), and living in barrios, mining towns, and industrial areas of the Midwest, and what they saw as their primary task: caring for their families.

While the women share a historic immigration journey, each story provides unique details and circumstances that testify to the diversity of the immigrant experience. The oral histories, a project more than forty years in the making, let these women speak for themselves, while historical information is added to support and illuminate the women’s voices.

paperback book cover of Rim to River with photograph of storm on top of desert mountain

Award Winner: Nonfiction (General)

Tom Zoellner walked across the length of Arizona to come to terms with his home state. But the trip revealed more mountains behind the mountains.

Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

In Rim to River, Zoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Country: paint an enduring portrait of a misunderstood American state. An indictment, a love letter, and a homecoming story all at once.

Congratulations to Miguel Montiel, Yvonne de la Torre Montiel, and Tom Zoellner!

Brian Haley Talks “Hopis and the Counterculture” on KJZZ Radio

Posted on October 4, 2024October 4, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

October 4, 2024

This week author Brian Haley discussed his new book Hopis and the Counterculture with reporter Sam Dingman, host of the radio program “The Show,” which is broadcast by Phoenix-based NPR station KJZZ.

In the new book, Haley, who is a cultural anthropologist, addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the appropriation of Indigenous identities that exploded in the 1960s.

In the interview, Haley and Dingman discuss the role Los Angeles radio stations played in amplifying appropriated ideas. Says Haley, “The Radio Free Oz broadcast started doing a number of radio documentaries that gave the Hopi traditionalist faction’s view of things without any real significant critique of what was actually going on there.”

Listen to the full interview.

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About the Author
Brian D. Haley is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Oneonta and a leading scholar of the appropriation of Indigenous identities by people with non-Native histories.

Stephen J. Pyne Gives Keynote Address on Fire to Geological Society of American Meeting

Posted on September 30, 2024September 30, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

September 30, 2024

Stephen J. Pyne, author of Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico and more than 40 other books about fire, gave the keynote address at a fire-themed session at the Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting on September 23, 2024. GSA previewed his address in this Youtube interview with him, “How Our Relationship with Fire Has Changed Through Time with Dr. Stephen Pyne.”

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park.

During the interview, Dr. Rachel Phillips, a GSA Science Communication Fellow, asked Pyne to explain more about the evolution of fire. He replied: “Fire is a shape shifter, I mean, fire is a reaction. It’s not a substance like earth, air, or water. It can assume many forms but it’s fundamentally a substance. Fire takes its character from its context so it synthesizes, it integrates its surroundings and as those surroundings change, fire changes. So, as oxygen levels on Earth change, fire changes. As plants and animals evolve and rearrange and organize terrestrial landscapes, fire assumes forms appropriate to those landscapes and those conditions.”

About Five Suns:

Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras, historian Stephen J. Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country. Creatively deploying the Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the “five suns” that it birthed, Pyne addresses the question, “Why does fire appear in Mexico the way it does?” Five Suns tells the saga through a pyric prism.

Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world today through its fire suppression capabilities, fire research, and industrial combustion, but also by those continuing customary practices that have become increasingly significant to a world that suffers too much combustion and too little fire.

The University of Arizona Press