Category: Author news

Sergio Troncoso Selected for Texas Literary Hall of Fame

Posted on September 9, 2024September 4, 2024 by maryreynolds

September 9, 2024

Sergio Troncoso, author of The Last Tortilla & Other Stories and From This Wicked Patch of Dust, has been selected to be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. The Texas Christian University Mary Couts Burnett Library, in partnership with the TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts and TCU Press, announced their selection for induction into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. The authors will be honored at the official induction ceremony on October 29, 2024.

Other authors honored this year are: Tracy Daugherty, Molly Ivins, Stephen Graham Jones, Cormac McCarthy, Jan Seale, and Cynthia Leitich Smith.

The Texas Literary Hall of Fame was established to celebrate and encourage the state’s rich literary heritage by honoring its foremost authors, whose original writing reflects enduring cultural relevance and artistic creativity. The Texas Literary Hall of Fame honors inductees every two years.

Congratulations Sergio!

About The Last Tortilla & Other Stories

Writing in a straightforward, light-handed style reminiscent of Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, Sergio Troncoso spins charming tales that reflect his experiences in two worlds. Troncoso’s El Paso is a normal town where common people who happen to be Mexican eat, sleep, fall in love, and undergo epiphanies just like everyone else. His tales are coming-of-age stories from the Mexican-American border, stories of the working class, stories of those coping with the trials of growing old in a rapidly changing society. He also explores New York with vignettes of life in the big city, capturing its loneliness and danger.

About From this Wicked Patch of Dust

In the border shantytown of Ysleta, Mexican immigrants Pilar and Cuauhtémoc Martínez strive to teach their four children to forsake the drugs and gangs of their neighborhood. The family’s hardscrabble origins are just the beginning of this sweeping novel. Spanning four decades, this is a story of a family’s struggle to become American and yet not be pulled apart by a maelstrom of cultural forces.

2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalists

Posted on September 4, 2024February 25, 2025 by Cameron Quan

September 4, 2024

We are happy to announce that five of our books have been named as finalists 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 finalists at this link.

About the books:

Anthropology/Archaeology Finalist

In Woven from the Center, Diane Dittemore presents breathtaking basketry from some of the greatest weavers in the Southwest. Each sandal and mat fragment, each bowl and jar, every water bottle and whimsy is infused with layers of aesthetic, cultural, and historical meanings. This book offers stunning photos and descriptions of woven works from Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham, Hopi, Western Apache, Yavapai, Navajo, Pai, Paiute, New Mexico Pueblo, Eastern Apache, Seri, Yaqui, Mayo, and Tarahumara communities.

Biography (Arizona Subject) Finalist

Editors Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez celebrate more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas in La Plonqui: The Literary Life and Work of Margarita Cota-Cárdenas. The book includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field.

Biography (Arizona Subject), Biography (Other), & History (Arizona) Finalist

World of Our Mothers highlights the largely forgotten stories of forty-five women immigrants in the early twentieth century. Through interviews in Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and selected areas of California, Texas, and the Midwest, authors Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel show us how these women negotiated their lives with their circumstances.

Nature/Environment Finalist

Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch tells the story of a decades-long habitat restoration project in southwestern New Mexico. Rancher-owner A. Thomas Cole explains what inspired him and his wife, Lucinda, to turn their retirement into years dedicated to hard work and renewal. The book shares the past and present history of a very special ranch south of Silver City, which is home to a rare type of regional wetland, a fragile desert grassland ecosystem, archaeological sites, and a critical wildlife corridor in a drought-stricken landscape.

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

Nonfiction (General) & Travel Finalist

A sharp examination of Arizona by a nationally acclaimed writer, Rim to River follows Tom Zoellner on a 790-mile walk across his home state as he explores key elements of Arizona culture, politics, and landscapes. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about a vibrant and baffling place.

Congratulations to all our authors!

July 1, 2024

Miranda Melcher of New Books Network podcast interviewed Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, author of Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics. In the interview, Quintana-Vallejo offers many examples of what happens in the gutter, the margins between the story panels in graphic novels and comics. For example, he explains a specific subtext in one author’s illustration style. In The Best We Could Do, author Thi Bui chose a particular color to convey their message:

“In using orange in order to represent that wound, that trauma, that she has to carry as a child into adulthood, the author and illustrator is kind of leveraging something that we might think is decorative in order to convey so much meaning.”

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, in Comics and Graphic Novels on New Books Network

Listen the full podcast here.

Quintana-Vallejo is an assistant professor at Rhode Island College. He is the author of Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States. He studies migration and diasporas in narratives about youth development in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. His essays have appeared in Literary Geographies, Norteamérica, the North Meridian Review, and Chasqui, and in several edited volumes. He grew up in Mexico City.

About Growing Up in the Gutter:

Growing Up in the Gutter offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Quintana-Vallejo analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.

June 24, 2024

Diné geographer Andrew Curley, author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation, discusses “The Colorado River and the Colonial Blindspot” as part of the “Natural History for a World in Crisis” series. This panel discussion, moderated by Beka Economopoulos, is the first in the year-long series produced by the The Natural History Museum. Curley is joined by Teresa Montoya (Diné), Traci Brynne Voyles, and Erika M. Bsumek, to explore the impact of colonial intrusions and challenge the audience into seeing “colonial blindspots” in the water crisis.

“We tend to focus on this issue of climate change, when really there’s never been enough water for settler designs. And each time there’s a new infrastructure built onto the river’s tributaries, it’s satisfying a temporary problem that is quickly overwhelmed by more and more settlers. It’s the nature of settler colonialism in the region.”

Andrew Curley, in The Colorado River and the Colonial Blindspot

Watch or read the transcript of the full video here. This link also includes an additional video: “Rethinking the Water Paradigm with Andrew Curley.”

Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. He has studied the social, cultural, and political implications of coal mining in the Navajo Nation, and his latest research is on the environmental history of water diversions on the Colorado River and the impact of colonial infrastructures on tribal nations.

About Carbon Sovereignty:

This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

Octavio Quintanilla wins 2024 Ambroggio Prize for “Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours”

Posted on June 13, 2024June 13, 2024 by maryreynolds

June 13, 2024

The Academy of American Poets has announced that Las Horas Impossibles | The Impossible Hours, written by Octavio Quintanilla and co-translated by Quintanilla and Natalia Treviño, was selected by Norma Cantú as the winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize, which is given annually for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winners receive $1,000 and publication by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature. Previous winners include Mara Pastor, with translators María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong; Margarita Pintado Burgos, with translator Alejandra Quintana Arocho; and Elizabeth Torres.

Cantú commented on the collection: “If this were a meal the various courses would delight my senses. With alacrity and wit the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum. The inclusion of computer generated design-poems adds to the impact of the volume. The translator more than ably renders the original Spanish poems into an equally moving English, often opting for the unexpected translation.”

Octavio Quintanilla

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera; publisher of Alabrava Press; and former poet laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual poems Frontextos have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.

Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño is the author of the poetry collection Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014) and the chapbook VirginX (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her awards include the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Menada Literary Award from Macedonia, and the San Antonio Artist Foundation Literary Prize. She is a professor of English at Northwest Vista College.

The 2025 Ambroggio Prize will be judged by Giannina Braschi and will be open for submissions from June 15, 2024, to September 15, 2024.

We are thrilled to be publishing this award-winning collection. Congratulations, Octavio!

***

About the Academy of American Poets

Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is a leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters across the United States and beyond. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program, which includes the Poet Laureate Fellowships. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to K–12 educators, including the award-winning weekly Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, including its staff, its Board of Directors, and its Board of Chancellors, visit: https://poets.org.

May 29, 2024

Mark Brodie of KJZZ public radio in Phoenix interviewed Stephen J. Pyne, author of Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park. Pyne says that the Yosemite fire story is a story of good fire that was lost, but has now been partly restored. He believes that the restoration of good fire should inform fire management on other federal lands.

“It’s not just the ecological deterioration that results when fire is removed. I mean, fire is a broad spectrum ecological catalyst. It does a lot of things. We’re still learning about all the things that it does. But it’s also a case of if you don’t burn it, stuff keeps building up, combustibles accumulate and the fires that you do get will be uncontrollable. So it, you’re removing your choice, your ability to choose what fires you want and what you don’t.”

Listen or read the full interview here.
Stephen Pyne, KJZZ interview

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire and he has written over thirty books. His most recent book is Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico (2024).

About Pyrocene Park:

Its monumental rocks, etched by glaciers during the last Ice Age, have made Yosemite National Park a crown jewel of the national park system and a world-celebrated destination. Yet, more and more, fire rather than ice is shaping this storied landscape. Renowned fire historian Pyne argues that the relationship between fire and humans has become a defining feature of our epoch, and he reveals how Yosemite offers a cameo of how we have replaced an ice age with a fire age: the Pyrocene.

Author Mike Anastario on “Agents of Change” Podcast

Posted on May 13, 2024May 6, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

May 13, 2024

The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast interviewed Mike Anastario, co-author of Kneeling Before Corn: Recuperating More-than-Human Intimacies on the Salvadoran Milpa. The book’s co-authors are Elena Salamanca and Elizabeth Hawkins. Anastario talks about their ethnographic research with corn farmers in El Salvador and how this evolved from focusing on the relationship between plants and people, to the impact of agrichemicals on the environment and human health. Listen to the podcast on Environmental Health News.

About the book:

Kneeling Before Corn focuses on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador. It explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks. Collective and multivocal, this work reflects independent lines of investigation and multiple conversations between co-authors—all of whom have lived in El Salvador for extended periods of time. Throughout the six chapters, the co-authors invite readers to consider more-than-human intimacies by rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing the intimacies that form between humans and the plants that they cultivate, conserve, long for, and eat. This book offers an innovative account of rural El Salvador in the twenty-first century.

Stephen Pyne Warns about the Pyrocene in Scientific American

Posted on May 6, 2024May 30, 2024 by maryreynolds

May 6, 2024

Stephen J. Pyne explains our present and future in “We Are Living in the Pyrocene—At Our Peril,” in the May 2024 issue of Scientific American.

Pyne reviews three cycles of fire on the Earth. “First fire” is nature’s fire, where for millions of years, lightning was the overwhelming source of ignition. By the 1880s in the United States, humans were responsible for the vast majority of burning. Indigenous people used fire for hunting, foraging, and general land maintenance. As Pyne explains, “Newcomers, too, had a fire heritage that they hauled across the Atlantic, one embedded in agriculture and pastoralism.” These human-handled fires are the “second fire,” used to make a landscape more inhabitable for people. By the end of the 19th century, the industrial revolution and the transition to combustion fire to power machinery marked “third fire.” Third fire burns fossil fuel and dominates Earth today. At the same time, humans tried to control “first fire,” wildland fires caused by lightning strikes. But, Pyne argues, “We have too little good fire. Restoring fire is tricky.”

Pyne writes in Scientific American:

Today we live in a fire age in which ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed and renewed by fire have become contemporary realities, even for people living in modern cities. In the summer of 2023 millions of residents of New York City and other metropolises saw dark-orange daytime skies thick with smoke palls from Canadian wildfires— and breathed in the effluent. Mythology has morphed into ecology.

Read the complete article here.

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire and he has written over thirty books. His two most recent books are Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico (2024) and Pyrocene Park (2023).

About Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico:

A climate defined by wet and dry seasons, a mostly mountainous terrain, a biota prone to disturbances, a human geography characterized by a diversity of peoples all of whom rely on burning in one form or another: Mexico has ideal circumstances for fire, and those fires provide a unique perspective on its complex history. Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras, Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country.

About Pyrocene Park:

Writing Westward Podcast Interviews Andrew Curley

Posted on April 25, 2024April 15, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 25, 2024

Writing Westward podcast host, Brenden W. Rensink, interviewed Andrew Curley, author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona.

During the interview, Curley said:

If we think about coal as not just an existential environmental question, but as a commodity that’s produced, what do we find through that analytical entry point? That’s where we find the consumers of this, the utilities and their constituents–ratepayers or state corporate commissions–all those entities and people who structure and limit what is possible, even in terms of energy production for tribes.

Listen to the full interview here.

About the book:

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.

John P. Schaefer to Bring “Desert Jewels” to Downtown Tucson

Posted on April 23, 2024April 24, 2024 by maryreynolds

April 23, 2024

The Southern Arizona Heritage & Visitor Center will host renowned Tucson photographer, author, and University of Arizona President Emeritus John P. Schaefer for a book signing. He will sign his book, Desert Jewels: Cactus Flowers of the Southwest and Mexico on May 14, at 11 a.m., at the Visitor Center in the Historic Pima County Courthouse, 115 N Church Ave., in downtown Tucson.

Cactus flowers are jewels of the desert—they add brilliant pops of color to our arid surroundings. In Desert Jewels, photographer Schaefer brings the exquisite and unexpected beauty of the cactus flower to the page. Hundreds of close-up photographs of cactus flowers native to the U.S. Southwest and Mexico offer a visual feast of color and texture, nuance and light.

These stunning photographs allow us to appreciate the spectacular range of color and form cactus flowers have to offer. The book offers a glimpse into Schaefer’s process for capturing these elusive desert gems. His beautiful photographs were featured as a book of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

About the author
John P. Schaefer had an active twenty-one-year career in teaching and research at the University of Arizona. A conservationist and avid birdwatcher, he helped organize the Tucson Audubon Society and founded the Nature Conservancy in Arizona. In addition to his academic and conservation work, Dr. Schaefer is a skilled photographer and author of several books on photography, including A Desert Illuminated: Cactus Flowers of the Sonoran Desert. He and Ansel Adams founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 1975.

The University of Arizona Press