The University of Arizona Press

August 20, 2026

C-SPAN’s Amercan History TV features a book talk with Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons authors of The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, moderated the wide-ranging discussion that was filmed at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March 2026. Dorothy Denetclaw is Tótsohnii born for Tł’ááschí’í. She has lived in Indian Wells, Arizona, her whole life. 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, and is a member of the Diné Studies Conference, based in Window Rock, Arizona.

Denetclaw talked about how she came to write this book with Fitzsimons, starting with stories from her childhood: “I didn’t see a white person or hear a word of English until I was nine years old. But during that time, my father talked to us and told us ‘this what happened.’ And he told me all these stories. . . . . Later on, I remembered my daddy’s stories and I started writing. Then Navajo Times newspaper reporter Cindy Yurth wrote the stories with me, and put it in the paper. . . . Matt read the stories in the newspaper and asked Cindy Yurth for my number.”

Watch the fascinating conversation in the video here.

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.

June 27, 2023

The University of Arizona’s Nancy Montoya interviewed Tom Zoellner about his book, Rim to River during the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. The UA’s Digital Futures Bilingual Studio hosted the interview, and the video is available here.

The book is 17 essays inspired by Zoellner’s walk across the state, from Utah to Mexico, on the Arizona Trail. “There’s a chapter in the book called ‘White Bones’ and it’s about the water shortage and the Colorado River,” says Zoellner in the interview. “And we’re running into a harsh reality in Arizona. To put it simply, it’s going to be farmers versus cities. And cities are going to win.” He thought a lot about water while hiking: “I developed a profound appreciation for water, the feeling of your body as you dehydrate. It’s a terrifying feeling.” In one of his chapters, Zoellner links this feeling of dehydration to the experience of border crossers, “the hardship of crossing the desert, and what they endure to feed their families back home.”

Rim to River is the story of his 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.