Category: Author Q&A

Kimberly Blaeser Featured on NPR

Posted on February 4, 2026February 4, 2026 by maryreynolds

February 4, 2026

Neda Ulaby interviewed Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light on National Public Radio for “All Things Considered.” Blaeser spoke about her book being a National Book Foundation Science +Literature selected title, and she spoke about finding inspiration from social issues. Ancient Light is a poetry collection that uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.

In the interview, Blaeser read her poem “About Standing (in Kinship).” Listen to the full interview here.

Blaeser is the author of six poetry collections and served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2015–16. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation, an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She also mentors Indigenous poets through Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), an organization she founded in 2020.

Five Questions with Silvia Bonilla

Posted on February 3, 2026December 19, 2025 by maryreynolds

February 3, 2026

In City of Eves, poet Silvia Bonilla evokes the lives and longing of three young women who suspect the wider world is a ship on the verge of departure—and who are determined not to be stranded on shore. Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Today, we talk with Bonilla about her latest work.

Some of your poems seem like an archive of girlhood. How do you decide which details—objects, sounds, textures—become part of the record?

I didn’t start with a specific method for deciding which sensory element would become part of the archive of childhood, of girlhood. Some poems were driven by emotional significance, some by cultural significance, and then the details followed.

Immigration narratives are often framed by struggle or loss. How does your poetry resist those narratives and instead create space for joy, complexity, and agency?

I wanted to focus on everyday resilience. The small victories of Sonia and her friends. Make clear their desire for being active agents of their own lives, even though they were victims of circumstance. Emphasizing the joy in their lives, even though there weren’t enough of those happier moments.

Your poem “Women at the Margins” evokes danger, and survival. How do you use poetic imagery to capture the vulnerability and resilience of women navigating borders and systems of power?

I establish a tone of pause in the first stanza that contrasts with the noises of the physical space. There is uncertainty and looming danger. The hyacinths shouting from plastic buckets juxtapose their vibrant beauty, all in the transient context of a bus station. The environment is transactional and dominated by men. The speaker assesses this environment and the stark reality of leaving her daughter behind. With the line “. . . I want you to know/ the first women also walked to trade/ their seeds—made eatable,/ taxable,” I wanted to connect her present-day plight to an ancient legacy of female agency and economic participation. The final image in the poem, “like water that accumulates in a street ditch” is a metaphor for an enduring spirit. A symbol of quiet and humble persistence.

In “Inventory,” the meat locker becomes a haunting metaphor. How do physical spaces and objects help you translate the immigrant experience into something readers can feel viscerally?

The meat locker serves as a chilling and potent metaphor. I wanted to bring to mind the confinement, isolation, and frigidity of immigration. I chose a cold and claustrophobic space, in which something slaughtered is “preserved” before being served for the consumption of others. I wanted readers to feel the journey in their bodies: to feel the cold, to smell the fear and blood.

Your poems evoke strong visual elements almost like painting. Are there particular artists or art movements that influence how you write about memory and imagination?

I believe in the strong interconnection of all of the arts. While there is no particular movement that inspires me more than another, I aim to draw from the strengths of all artistic disciplines. The visual power of a painting, the movement of dance or film, the rhythm of music—all of it is useful to me. I hope to use as many forms of art as I can, to overwhelm the senses.

Silvia Bonilla holds an MFA from the New School. She is the author of the chapbook An Animal Startled by the Mechanism of Life. Her work has been featured in Blackbird, Green Mountains Review, and Cream City Review. She has received support from the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Napa Valley Conference, Community of Writers, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Juniper Institute.

Essay by Danielle P. Williams in Poetry Daily

Posted on February 2, 2026February 2, 2026 by maryreynolds

February 2, 2026

Danielle P. Williams, author of Chamorrita Song, wrote an essay for for Poetry Daily‘s What Sparks Poetry: Language as Form.

In “Danielle P. Williams on Langston Hughes’ ‘Crossing Jordan’” she writes: “The poem reads like a call issued inward, a journey through internal and external worlds shaped by racial injustice, historical displacement, and psychic fracture. The speaker stands in solitude, not elevated by choice, but placed there by circumstance, struggling in a society built on colonization of Black and Indigenous people.”

Read the full essay here.

About Chamorrita Song:

For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection.

Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.

Here Williams reveals capacious contemporary forms that speak to the future as well as to the past and that further ground lineages in homelands, finding strength and beauty in collective pain and triumph. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.

Five Songs: A Poetry Playlist by Logan Phillips

Posted on January 26, 2026January 20, 2026 by Cameron Quan

January 22, 2026

Today we share a poetry playlist by Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, featuring songs that illuminate the author’s creative process.

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.

Read (and listen along with) Phillips’ playlist below:

I’m so lucky to have inherited a love of music from my parents, who filled my childhood with albums across the shifting formats of the era: vinyl to cassette to CD to vinyl again, with a couple inexplicable 8-tracks lurking around. I’ve spent many of my adult years working as a DJ, still in love with how music brings us together. But writing requires endless hours of solitude, so this playlist turns to ambient/drone/African blues/doom metal, especially the records that were in heavy rotation during the writing of Reckon.

(Speaking of music formats, I’ll briefly point out that there’s probably no ethical way to have access to all music ever recorded for $11.99 a month, especially when the corporation selling the subscription has the poor practices and the dubious morals of Spotify or the other corporations eviscerating the arts economy. Where possible, links in this playlist point to Bandcamp, which is the platform I use, and probably the best online option for musicians trying to survive and make art in 2026.)

Track #1: “Foreign Smokes,” BCMC. 2023.
That cold, liminal air under the first gray-blue of dawn. While writing Reckon I started my days with a song like this one (“Birds” by SUSS is another): a song still loose in mind, with glimpses of dreams, elided pasts, possible futures.

Track #2: “Sundown,” Barn Owl. 2010.
The window of my study faces east, and I write through the dawn hours. Though this track is called “Sundown,” it will always remind me of the inflection point in the morning ritual: sun staring into my eyes, page-screen blurred, fully lost in the poem-memory-vision, volume extremely loud. Hard to pick a single song off “Ancestral Star” since I always let the whole record run—“Sundown” is the opening—“Awakening” might be the actual key cut.

Track #3: “WZN#3,” 75 Dollar Bill. 2019.
Jim Simmerman, one of my early poetry mentors, told me in 2003 that “90% of what is interesting about repetition is variation.” Maybe that means the point of a pattern is to break it, setting up an expectation in order to have the chance to subvert it. The movement of this song reminds me of the arc of a writing session—an arrhythmic riffing gathering sounds before coalescing around a relentless beat and riding that rhythm wherever it may take us—into chaos and back again, over and over and over, dizzy.

Track #4: “Jbit Aala Khiam,” Tapan Meets Génération Taragalte. 2019.
Picking up where the 75 Dollar Bill left off (like any DJ transition worth the salt), this record is a one-off collab between a Moroccan/Touareg desert blues group and Serbian electronic producer. I’m struck by how deserts can sound so similar, regardless of hemisphere. Amps cranked, bouncing among the canyon walls or lost out to the swirling horizon. I get lost in here, a necessary condition for the writing of poetry.

Track #5: “Jerusalem, Part 1,” Sleep. 1996.
No way around it—there’s going to be either Earth or Sleep on this playlist. And if it’s not Sleep’s album-length alternative take “Dopesmoker,” it’s this one. If metal isn’t your thing, substitute with Pixies “Silver” (silver being Tombstone’s raison d’etre)—but on repeat no less than five times in a row, please. In any case, no honest look at “The American West” can avoid seeing the violence—not just the atomized, romanticized individual gunfighter—but the systemic grind of genocide and its engine: capitalism. It’s dark, especially knowing that it touches my family’s history, as it touches everyone alive today in one way or another. There’s no healing without first looking at the wound: understanding its depths, contours and causes. One part of Reckon is my attempt to not look away from the violence that has benefited me. Doom metal helps me sustain the gaze.

Bonus Tracks:

“Hours in the Evening,” Sarah Davachi. 2018.
Then this distortion falls away and we’re left with the hum of the rocks under a forgiving winter sun. I might have spent more hours listening to Davachi—an incredibly prolific Canadian composer—than any other single artist in the last few years. Bitchin’ Bajas would be a close second. There’s something about drone music that takes me out of time: of course there’s no beat (time measure) but I mean the voice of the rocks, the rush of the blood, throbbing ebb of a little lifetime.

“Abusey Junction,” KOKOROKO. 2019.
There’s so much grief inherent in gazing through the concentric circles of time. Not only when looking at capital ‘H’ History, but even when feeling into personal memories, the ephemeral beauty of them. The word nostalgia has at its (ancient Greek) root the longing to return home, an impossible, often dislocated desire. This cut hits deep for me. I can never truly return to the early, quiet bliss, fully held by love and land—and it may never have existed quite as I remember it anyway. So, what’s to do other than carry it deep down, tending and honoring love’s small flame without asking too much of it, handwriting a hearth of poems where others might catch glimpses from time to time, doing my best to pass it to the children in my life.

Logan 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, including the NoVoGRAFíAS series (2009–present). A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects. He completed an MFA at the University of Arizona. www.dirtyverbs.com.

Five Songs: A Poetry Playlist by Danielle P. Williams

Posted on January 13, 2026December 8, 2025 by Cameron Quan

January 13, 2026

Today we share a poetry playlist by Danielle P. Williams, author of Chamorrita Song, featuring five tracks that illuminate the poet’s creative process.

For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection. Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.

Read (and listen along with) Williams’ playlist below:

Track #1: “Just Like Water” by Lauryn Hill
I’ve always longed for the water. The anointing of ancestral acceptance. Felt a sense of godliness in the power the ocean carries. The kind of power music carries. This is a song that brings it all to life for me. It envelops me in a trance of willingness and vulnerability. Bathing me “in a fountain of his essence,” I’ve always felt so humbled by Lauryn Hill’s honesty, in her ability to say what is needed in this way. Giving in to the water. Giving in to the fear of misunderstanding and allowing the movement of chords to compel a story that is so familiar. A Black woman yearning for understanding. A musician turning to what they know best to relate to a world that was never really built for them. Like she says before the song even starts, this is what happens after rebellion. A choice to be softer. A choice to seek the kind of knowledge that brings you to the version of yourself you’ve only really ever dreamt about until now.

That is what Chamorrita Song is. A return to the self after what felt like a lifetime of defiance. A song I shaped from a world of pain. Water washing over me. Cleansing me of what the world insisted wasn’t possible for someone like me. The arpeggiated chords have always transported me, guiding me to write some of the most difficult poems I’ll ever write. In a way, I’ve taken that yearning, that hunger for more, and allowed myself to fully embody my emotions on the page. And sometimes when it feels too hard, I play this song.

Track #2: Cover of Brandy’s “Necessary” by Ahja Wells
This cover of Brandy’s “Necessary,” sung by Ahja Wells of The Walls Group, flips the original into a gospel offering—bridging that longing for personal triumph with purposeful praise. It takes a familiar, already intimate song and reframes it in a new light, mirroring how so many poems in Chamorrita Song are pleading to be understood in a multitude of ways. How one message can hold such duality. How a single phrase can open into whole worlds of thought. What I love about this version is its fearlessness—its willingness to take what existed before and transform it into an experience that carries a different idea of love and understanding.

This speaks true for so many poems in this collection that honor writers and people in my life who have helped me interpret the world. It pays homage while also expanding outward, gathering all those ideologies and shaping them into one feeling. And toward the end, Ahja flips the song again, blending in “Until the End of Time” by Justin Timberlake, weaving three ways to express the same truth: how necessary it is to love and be loved. What it means to belong to this world in a bigger way than we sometimes allow ourselves to imagine.

Track #3: “Symptom of Life” by Willow
This song holds the angst of the human condition. The choice to take what haunts you and make something beautiful. For me, it manifests as the hard truth of what Black, Indigenous, and queer communities have endured—and continue to endure. A reminder that no matter what has happened to you, you must decide how it will continue to live inside you. Pain is inevitable. Emerging from it is not. How will you choose another route through?

There’s something in the way Willow admits to “pushing and peeling myself out of disguise,” something in the way they keep “pushing and peeling the layers that cover my mind,” that feels like a blueprint for survival. A constant unmasking. A shedding. A turning toward the rawest parts of the self.

Chamorrita Song’s translations and adaptations speak directly to this. A calling back to ancestral ways of endurance, alongside my own depression and anxiety repeating those same patterns. It helps me look back at how those before me carved out paths from their pain through a creative outlet that felt inherently theirs whether poetry, dance, weaving, carving, song, or whatever form of expression that happened to take hold of them. Because what is art if not a symptom of life?

Track #4: “At My Own Risk” by Danielle P. Williams featuring Jonzie Bonez and Toyya Lynai
This song, for me, perfectly encapsulates my rage at this time in my life. The breaking point that lets me reclaim my voice in an unapologetic way, setting the scene for a new version of myself and how I used my art to speak my truth. It’s about the risk of choosing yourself and the possibility of long-term reward. In its own way, it feels like its own version of a Chamorrita Song. Gritty, honest, unconcerned with how anyone else sees me. I remember writing it in about ten minutes, how every poem around that time just poured out of me. A release of pent-up frustration that set the tone for the rest of the music that followed. It felt so good to return to the musician in me after drifting from that version of myself. Poetry and music have always driven me, even when I was young. And whenever I return to the songs I’ve made, I know I’ve reached a new understanding of myself—one ready to accept whatever comes next and reap the rewards of continuing to come into myself as a poet and a person.

Track #5: “All I Do” by Robert Glasper featuring SiR, Bridget Kelly, and Song Bird
This song feels like longing. A slow haunting of personal will. A plea to be seen and heard. It begins with poetry and expands into a stunning collaboration that calls for more. In some ways it reminds me of my “why” for writing this collection. How a piece of me exists in every poem I write, especially the ones that reach toward those before me and those after. When I applied to MFA programs, one of the poems in my packet was an early version of Tano’ I Man Chamorro, the words on our crest meaning “Land of the CHamorus.” Even then, before diving into translation and poetry during my years at George Mason, I knew one thing: I needed to understand more deeply. And if there was anything I could do, I would do it—to understand better, to write better, to be better. This song has played hundreds of thousands of times over the years, looping and urging me to keep pouring myself onto the page, even when I felt like I was doing it wrong. I knew Chamorrita Song was something I had to write, even before I could name what it was becoming. That feeling pushed me to soak in everything—traveling back home to the Marianas, immersing myself in stories and histories, and questioning what it means to live my experience in a way only I can. Sometimes it feels strange to claim the term “Chamorrita Song” as my own, because I am still early in my journey of understanding my culture and myself. There is so much I will get wrong, and so much I probably already have. But over the years, I’ve learned it’s not about doing something “right” or “wrong.” It’s about fully surrendering to the process of belonging. And if that’s all I do, I’m grateful I did.

Danielle P. Williams is a Black and Chamorro poet, translator, essayist, and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina. She received her BA in Arts administration from Elon University in 2016 and MFA in poetry from George Mason University in 2021. Her chapbook, Who All Gon’ Be There?, was a finalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and selected from the Backbone Press 3rd Annual Chapbook Competition for publication in fall 2021. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a copywriter and creative strategist.

Ann Hedlund Reveals Modernist Artist Mac Schweitzer on Podcast

Posted on December 4, 2025November 26, 2025 by maryreynolds

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.

Podcast: Ana Patricia Rodríguez Discusses Salvadoran Artists in Washington, D.C.

Posted on November 24, 2025November 21, 2025 by maryreynolds

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.

Mujeres de Maiz Featured on Mexican TV News

Posted on November 21, 2025November 21, 2025 by Anissa Suazo

November 21, 2025

Mexico’s Canal Once (Channel Eleven, Mexico’s public television network) featured the Mujeres de Maiz organization on its Cooltureando program. The reporter interviewed Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, co-editor with Amber Rose González, and Nadia Zepeda, of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the interview, Montes talks about the Mexican inspiration for Mujeres de Maiz, and the need to create a “safe space and a brave space” in Los Angeles for women who are artists and activists. She also emphasized the organization’s indigenous roots; she explained: “There’s a Native concept of braiding mind, body, and spirit. So we are always trying to put those together.” Montes visited Mexico City to share her work at Chicanxs Sin Fronteras, as part of “Encuentro de Cultura Chicana.”

Watch the Cooltureando video here.

About the book:

Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis‘ political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward “a world where many worlds fit.”

The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

Podcast with K.G. Hutchins

Posted on November 18, 2025November 6, 2025 by maryreynolds

November 18, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with K.G. Hutchins author of A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia. Hutchins is a cultural anthropologist interested in the intersection of music and the environment. His research focuses on the roles that nonhuman animals, spirits, and other beings can play in cultural heritage, particularly in Mongolia and southern Appalachia.

Asked about how the context of his Mongolia research, Hutchins answered, “I’m a cultural anthropologist with a music background . . . so I asked musicians, ‘what’s important to know about Mongolian music, especially about the morin khuur, or horse fiddle?’ It permeates the soundscape of north Asian music, but we don’t know much about it. My advisors said that if you want to know about the horse fiddle, you need to know about the horses and the role they play in the way that you learn the instrument, and the way that you learn to be a listener of the instrument.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency.

Hutchins’s ethnographic research, spanning more than a decade, provides a vivid and intimate portrayal of Mongolian life. Musicians use the morin khuur, or ‘horse fiddle,’ to engage with the subjectivities and agencies of nonhuman animals and other beings. This work is a significant contribution to the posthuman turn in social sciences, engaging with theories from prominent scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.

Podcast: Joe Watkins Talks about Japan’s Ainu People

Posted on November 10, 2025November 12, 2025 by maryreynolds

November 10, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Joe Watkins author of Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future. Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is an affiliated faculty member in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was president of the Society for American Archaeology from 2019–2021. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.

Asked about how he became interested in the Ainu people, Watkins answered, “A colleague at Hokkaido University in Japan asked if I would come to Japan to talk about the issues American Indians faced in terms of membership status, issues of repatriation and other issues of archaeology. . . . The four-day trip to Sapporo where I talked about these issues was the beginning of seventeen years of work with Hokkaido University on archaeological excavations that involved Ainu history, and of working with Ainu individuals to further discuss how archaeological work can impact Ainu communities.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Relaying the deep history of the islands of Japan, Watkins tells the archaeological story from the earliest arrivals some 40,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago when local cultures began utilizing pottery and stone tools. About 2,300 years ago, another group of people immigrated from the Korean peninsula into the Japanese archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture with them. They intermarried with the people who were there, forming the basis of the contemporary Japanese majority culture. As the Japanese state developed on the central Islands of Honshu, Ryukyu, and Shikoku, the people of Hokkaido continued developing along a different trajectory with minimal interaction with the mainland until colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, when the people known as the Ainu came under Japanese governmental policy.

The University of Arizona Press