Thank you to everyone who made the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books an unforgettable celebration of literacy! We are grateful to so many people: the authors who shared their books; the staff who worked at our tent; the volunteers who worked behind the scenes to make it all happen; and most important, the Tucson community who showed up to support the Press and our authors.
We’re continuing the celebration until April 11, 2026 by offering a 25% discount off all books when you use code AZTFOB26 on our website.
Below, enjoy some highlights from the weekend:
The bargain book shelf is always a popular feature in our tentUA Press is the premier publisher of books about the environment of the Southwest
The festival begins for staff on Friday, when we set up our tent! Later in the afternoon, authors arrive for a special reception in the Campus Store.
Mishawn (left) and author Danielle P. WIlliams (right) talk with Dorothy Denetclaw (seated).Left to right: Matt Fitzsimons, Dorothy Denetclaw, Craig Johnson.Left to right: Joe Watson, Carol Ellick, Matt Fitzsimons.Left to right: Kathryn Conrad, Abby Mogollón, Dorothy Denetclaw, Mary Reynolds, Margie Farmer.
University of Arizona Press authors were presenting at panels and signing book all around campus.
Danielle P. Williams and Logan Phillips sign books at a table in the UA Campus Store.“Laureates in Conversation” (left to right): Alberto Ríos, Joy Harjo, Arthur Sze, and TC Tolbert.
And hosting book signings at our tent is something we look forward to every year!
Author Joe Watkins with his wife and collaborator, Carol Ellick.
Author Ann Lane Hedlund discusses her book, Mac Schweitzer.
Author David Burckhalter signs a copy of his new book beside author Jennifer Jenkins.
Author Danielle P. Williams signs a copy of Chamorrita Song.Author Matt Fitzsimons and Dorothy Denetclaw greet festival attendees.Author Laura Tohe talks with festival attendees.Tom Zoellner discusses his work with a festival attendee.Tom Zoellner signs a copy of his book, Rim to River.Author David Burckhalter signs a copy of his new book, Baskets from the Seri Coast.Authors Logan Phillips and Mele Martinez greet guests at the festival.Arizona Poet Laureate, Laura Tohe (seated right), talks with festival attendees alongside UA Press Director, Kathryn Conrad (seated left) and Art Director, Leigh McDonald (right).
A very special session on Sunday, March 15, introduced the new Tucson and Arizona Poet Laureates, who are both University of Arizona Press authors!
Arizona Poet Laureate, Laura Tohe, sits beside Tucson Poet Laureate, Logan Phillips. Both poet laureates gave their inaugural readings at the festival.
If you’re still reading, here’s your reward: this photo of a VIP who visited our tent this year. You never know who you’ll run into at the Tucson Festival of Books!
If you can’t attend this year, or if you’d like to purchase a book you discover at our table, we’ve got you covered: enter AZNACCS26 at checkout on our website for 40% offall titles through 4/29/26.
New & Featured Chicano/a/x and Latina/o/x Studies Titles
In Indigenous Genres of the Human, scholar Gabriela Raquel Ríos considers how Latina/o/x communities engage in the ethical reclamation of indigeneity. Through case studies that include testimonios and other Indigenous storytelling practices, Ríos reveals how cultural logics of colonization continue to shape—and often constrain—understandings of indigeneity across Latin America and in the United States. Rather than reinforcing binaries defined by settler colonialism, Ríos proposes a framework that centers community knowledge and grounded practices.
Excavating narrative memories, Across Canonsexamines literary allusions to a classic Latin American canon that resurface in the work of Latin American writers who live and work in the United States. The immigrant literature of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Alberto Fuguet, and Cristina Rivera Garza from the late 1990s and early 2000s provides an important glimpse into representations of Latin America’s relationship with the United States and how immigration has shaped it. Author Thania Muñoz D. looks at immigrant experiences impacted by a prism of social and political factors, including free trade agreements, drug trafficking, political violence, massive foreign debt, and economic dependency.
Contentious Citizenship reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement to the post–civil war era, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and revolutionary politics that transcend borders.
Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
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.
Life Undocumented captures the compelling stories of Latinx undocumented young adults growing up and living in two distinct sociopolitical contexts: California, which provides legal pathways into higher education for undocumented youth, and Georgia, which does not. The book is about how undocumented young adults in these two contexts navigate the pathway to and through adulthood, and the powerful role state laws and policies play in shaping their prospects for social mobility and their sense of belonging. Edelina M. Burciaga examines how state laws and policies in California and Georgia shape the pathways to adulthood for these individuals.
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.
Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In meXicana Roots and Routes, editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández gather established and emerging scholars to draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes.
Featured Series
BorderVisions engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies.
Latinx Pop Culture is a new series that aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
TheCritical Issues in Indigenous Studies series anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity.
Arizona Crossroads explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona.
Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
We are thrilled to be attending the 2026 Latina/o/x Studies Association conference in Austin this week! From March 26 to 29, find our table in the LSA Plaza, “a dynamic space to get together with long-time friends and colleagues—and find new ones—over coffee and conversation.” Navigation help and additional details are available on the LSA website.
We’ll have a curated selection of our new, featured, and popular Latinx studies titles on display. To order books, enter AZLSA26 at checkout on our website for 40% offall titles through 4/23/26.
New & Featured Latinx Studies Titles
Central American Women in Diaspora by Karina Alma and Ester E. Hernández focuses on Central American women’s voices within the growing narrative of the Central American diaspora. It provides a tapestry of testimonios—from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—who explore what it means to be Central American women in the United States. An intervention that centers gendered experiences and challenges oppressive structures, this volume celebrates the solidarity, cultural memory, and healing found within transnational ties.
Excavating narrative memories, Thania Muñoz looks at immigrant experiences impacted by a prism of social and political factors. Across Canonsexamines literary allusions to a classic Latin American canon that resurface in the work of Latin American writers who live and work in the United States. The immigrant literature of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Alberto Fuguet, and Cristina Rivera Garza from the late 1990s and early 2000s provides an important glimpse into representations of Latin America’s relationship with the United States and how immigration has shaped it.
Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead.
Contentious Citizenship reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and revolutionary politics that transcend borders. Zimmerman’s work honors the ingenuity and resilience of Salvadoran activists and invites readers to consider what it means to belong.
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.
Life Undocumented captures the compelling stories of Latinx undocumented young adults growing up and living in two distinct sociopolitical contexts: California, which provides legal pathways into higher education for undocumented youth, and Georgia, which does not. Edelina M. Burciaga examines how undocumented young adults in these two contexts navigate the pathway to and through adulthood, and the powerful role state laws and policies play in shaping their prospects for social mobility and their sense of belonging.
Featured Series
BorderVisions engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies.
Latinx Pop Culture is a new series that aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
TheCritical Issues in Indigenous Studies series anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity.
Arizona Crossroads explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona.
Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
The University of Arizona Press is attending the 2026 Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting in Albuquerque this week! From March 17 through 21, find our table in the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town to browse our anthropology books and talk with our Senior Acquiring Editor, Allyson Carter.
If you can’t attend this year, or if you want to order a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZSFAA26 for 40% offall titles through April 14, 2026.
Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? To learn more about publishing with us, click here.
New Anthropology Titles
The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological well-being. In Feeding the World as if People Mattered, Andrew Flachs asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.
In the shadow of Mexico’s ongoing human rights crisis, Digging for Hopeoffers a powerful feminist ethnography of resistance, care, and collective memory. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, R. Aída Hernández Castillo documents the courageous work of women-led search collectives who, in the face of extreme violence, search for their disappeared loved ones. Through physical and spiritual practices such as exhumation, mourning, and poetic remembrance, these women reclaim dignity for the dead and challenge a society that has normalized disappearance.
Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead.
In Central American Women in Diaspora, Karina Alma and Ester E. Hernández provide a tapestry of testimonios—from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—who explore what it means to be Central American women in the United States. Through the practice of testimonio, contributors create intergenerational dialogues between mothers and daughters, engage with Indigenous oral traditions, and reflect on the violent histories of war in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
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.
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.
Featured Series
Global Change/Global Health is a new series for scholarly monographs that treat global change and human health as interconnected phenomena. The goals of the series are to advance scholarship across the social and health sciences, contribute to public debates, and inform public policies about the human dimensions of global change.
biodiversity in small spaces is a series that provides short, to-the-point books that re-examine the conservation of biodiversity in small places and focus on the interplay of memory, identity, and affect in determining what matters, and thus what stays, thereby shaping the fabric of biodiversity in the present and, ultimately, the future. The authors will cover, in an accessible way, the range of marginalities, subjectivities, and chronologies, from indigenous farmers nurturing, defending, or repatriating their traditional crop varieties to college towns re-embedding food production and consumption into the social fabric of their communities.
Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity.
Critical Green Engagements is a series that critically engages with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship and puts forth alternatives to discourses that dominate “green” practices. The series explores how different advocates, bystanders, and opponents engage with the changes envisaged by policy directives and environmental visions.
The University of Arizona Press is attending the 2026 AWP Conference and Bookfair in Baltimore, Maryland! March 4-7, find us at booth #838 to purchase books and meet our authors.
We’re looking forward to hosting University of Arizona Press authors for book signings at our booth this year! Take a look at the schedule below to find out where and when you can meet them and get your books signed.
If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: enter AZAWP26 at checkout on our website for 40% offall titles through 4/23/26.
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.” With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.
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. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.
Winner of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets
This award-winning bilingual collection intertwines the lives of a Renaissance painter and a modern migrant worker, offering a fresh perspective on art and migration. In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents.
In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived. María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home—her Holy Children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of God. Homero Aridjis’s novel, vividly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts, tells the story of the motley crew of bohemians, researchers, and holy fools, both real and imagined, who descend on the town of Huautla de Jiménez searching for inspiration, distraction, and salvation in the sacred mushrooms.
In City of Eves, 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. 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.
Severalty begins in a garden and moves through ancestral and contemporary hometowns that shimmer between wholeness and severing. In these poems, river currents tick with the intrusion of the clock’s lavish precincts. From powerfully compressed lyrical fragments to pulsing narrative sequences, Severalty shifts perspectives to examine devastation and healing, transience and seasonality, loss and resurrection. Weaving the past and present into a stunning tapestry, this collection is a powerful testament to Indigenous endurance and creativity, offering readers a deeply insightful and necessary work.
Featured Series
Camino del Sol was established in 1994 by writer and poet Ray Gonzalez. As one of the first publishers to spotlight poetry, fiction, and essays from both emerging and established voices in Latinx literature, the University of Arizona Press and its critically acclaimed Camino del Sol series have provided a literary home for distinguished writers such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Carmen Giménez Smith, Luis Alberto Urrea, Richard Blanco, Alberto Ríos, Pat Mora, Tim Z. Hernandez, Emmy Pérez, and Francisco X. Alarcón.
Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. Launched in 1971, the series has included more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by such distinguished artists as Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Luci Tapahonso.
Bibliophiles rejoice: the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books is right around the corner! March 14-15, find tent #247 on the University of Arizona campus where we’ll be selling books, hosting author signings, and connecting with the incredible Tucson community.
With authors from many genres presenting on panels and signing books at our tent this year, there will be something for everyone. All books will be 25% off during the festival, and we will once again have our ever-popular $5 bookshelf.
Take a look at the schedule below to find out where and when you can meet University of Arizona Press authors, or view the complete 2026 Tucson Festival of Books Presenting Author schedule. We look forward to seeing you there!
Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)
Description:
What does it mean to lead with curiosity and act with purpose? Join David Gelles, David Litt and John P. Schaefer for a conversation that spans bold adventures, unexpected leadership and public service. Expect insights, humor, and inspiring reminders of how each of us can chart a meaningful path.
From the musical incantation of lyric to the political rhythms of slam, what role does performance play in bringing poems to life? Join three electrifying poets who expertly translate their words from the printed page to the human voice and hear them discuss their approaches to enacting language.
Some of the early twentieth century West’s most interesting crime stories are the ones documented in history wrong. Authors Dorothy Denetclaw, Matt Fitzsimons, and Mark Archuleta correct the record and reveal the untold stories.
Local writer Melani Martinez, author of “The Molino,” will lead a workshop on telling family food stories. She’ll explore why capturing these moment matter, why they are important to document, and how to engage with relatives.
How can we talk about trauma? Laura Da’ and Richard Siken examine the aftermath of illness, delving into devastation, healing, loss, and limitation. Through deeply personal narratives and precise writing about the body, these poets explore how we might begin to talk about our altered lives.
Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)
Description:
Artists offer a special bridge to understanding the Southwest. Artist Molly Hashimoto and biographer Ann Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer, discuss why works of art and books about art and artists are critical to our understandings of this special place.
Do our memories describe the past or reinvent it? Three poets allow us intimate access to their histories, traumas, and triumphs, demonstrating how poetry can be a vehicle to confront legacies of violence, while embracing radical methods of survival and resistance.
In this workshop, poet and author Logan Phillips will share strategies and exercises for inviting hybridity into memoir writing, transgressing genre to draw on the strengths of poetry, essay, screenplay, even photography and collage.
A viral headline recently asked, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” In yet another era of sexism and misogyny, what kind of intervention can poetry make? Hear from three visionary poets who confront everyday injustices and cultural crises in their writing to affirm a more equal world.
Poetry allows us to ask difficult questions like: Why do we have borders? What are borders, where do they come from, and how do they shape our language? Three poets investigate these questions, challenging the borders of place, identity, genre, history, and language.
2:30 PM
Title:
Seeing the Southwest
Location:
UA Library/Special Collections
Date/Time:
Sunday, March 15, 2:30 pm – 3:25 pm
Panelists:
Craig Childs, E.A. Hanks, Ann Hedlund, Dora Rodriguez
Moderators:
Gregory McNamee
Genres:
Southwest Books of the Year
Signing Area:
Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)
Description:
In this session, the authors of four Southwest Books of the Year will discuss the role that landscape and culture played in the development of their work.
Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Craft Tent & Signing Area
Description:
¡Viva Tucson! In this conversation with local legends and multigenerational Tucsonans Lydia Otero and Melani Martinez, we will learn about the history of two iconic Tucson locations: La Casa Cordova, a home built in the 1840s, and El Molino: one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories.
Join us as Mayor Regina Romero introduces the new Tucson Poet Laureate and the new Arizona Poet Laureate for their inaugural readings. Both laureates will serve as official ambassadors for poetry, building a public life for poetry in Southern Arizona and throughout the state.
The University of Arizona Press is attending the 2025 American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans this week! Find us at booth #101 to browse our latest anthropology titles and meet with our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter.
If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZAAA25 for 40% offall books, with free shipping onorders over $60.
Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? To learn more about publishing with us, click here.
New & Featured Anthropology Titles
In Indigenizing Japan, archaeologist Joe E. Watkins provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition. Watkins’s insightful analysis highlights the Ainu’s enduring spirit and their resurgence as part of the global Indigenous movement. Key events such as the 1997 Nibutani Dam case and the 2007 recognition of the Ainu as Japan’s Indigenous people are explored in depth, showcasing the Ainu’s ongoing fight for cultural preservation and self-determination. By situating the Ainu’s experiences within broader global colonial histories, Indigenizing Japan underscores the shared struggles and resilience of Indigenous communities worldwide.
Flows of Violence offers a profound ethnographic exploration of the intricate relationship between violence and water infrastructure in one of Colombia’s most marginalized cities. This groundbreaking work engages with the concept of “infrastructural violence,” revealing how the Colombian state’s neglect and inadequate provision of water services perpetuate inequality and suffering among Buenaventura’s residents. Through extensive fieldwork, Felipe Fernández provides rich empirical data and firsthand accounts that bring to light the daily struggles and resilience of the city’s inhabitants. This timely contribution underscores the urgent need for equitable infrastructure development and social justice, making it a pivotal text for understanding urban poverty and state dynamics in Latin America and beyond.
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. In Restless Ecologies, Allison Caine draws on the Quechua concept of k’ita, or restlessness, to explore 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.
What does it mean to be a Quechua or Aymara speaker today in Puno, the capital of the Peruvian altiplano? What does it mean to be an Indigenous ethnic Quechua or Aymara individual? Mother Tongues of the High Andes opens with these questions, exploring what Quechua and Aymara languages and identities mean for Indigenous puneños as they navigate their past and present. Anthropologist Sandhya Krittika Narayanan argues that understanding inter-Indigenous linguistic and social differences involves examining Indigenous gender roles, responsibilities, and linguistic practices, particularly those of Indigenous puneña women. She shows how these practices have contributed to the maintenance of Indigenous multilingualism and continuity in local modes of understanding Indigenous identity and difference.
What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani’sAlterhumanism invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of coexistence. Reflecting on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers, environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists, Di Giminiani brings to light how these diverse groups navigate the enduring impacts of settler-caused environmental depletion and their aspirations for new ethics of care.
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 Horsesby Kip Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. At the intersection of music, environment, and posthumanism, A Song for the Horses shows how Mongolian musicians use cultural traditions to imagine and build toward alternative futures beyond climate change and neoliberalism.
Featured Series
Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity. The series editors are especially interested in works that analyze colonization, land dispossession, and oppression while foregrounding Indigenous peoples’ resistance to these processes.
Global Change/Global Health is a series for scholarly monographs that treat global change and human health as interconnected phenomena. The goals of the series are to advance scholarship across the social and health sciences, contribute to public debates, and inform public policies about the human dimensions of global change.
Biodiversity in small spaces is a series that provides short, to-the-point books that re-examine the conservation of biodiversity in small places and focus on the interplay of memory, identity, and affect in determining what matters, and thus what stays, thereby shaping the fabric of biodiversity in the present and, ultimately, the future. The authors will cover, in an accessible way, the range of marginalities, subjectivities, and chronologies, from indigenous farmers nurturing, defending, or repatriating their traditional crop varieties to college towns re-embedding food production and consumption into the social fabric of their communities.
Critical Green Engagementsis a series that critically engages with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship and puts forth alternatives to discourses that dominate “green” practices. The series explores how different advocates, bystanders, and opponents engage with the changes envisaged by policy directives and environmental visions. It also examines which forms of social movements emerge from these ideologies and how social movement actors connect. The series showcases the rigorous, high-quality research and writing emerging in response to these transformations and channels the energies and skills of an international collection of leading environmental scholars.
Native Peoples of the Americas is an ambitious series whose scope ranges from North to South America and includes Middle America and the Caribbean. Each volume takes unique methodological approaches—archaeological, ethnographic, ecological, and/or ethno-historical—to frame cultural regions. Volumes cover select theoretical approaches that link regions, such as Native responses to conquest and the imposition of authority, environmental degradation, loss of Native lands, and the appropriation of Native knowledge and cosmologies. These books illuminate the strategies that Native Peoples have employed to maintain both their autonomies and identities. The series encourages the participation of Native, well-established, and emerging scholars as authors, contributors, and editors for the books.
For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Allyson Carter at ACarter@uapress.arizona.edu.
If you weren’t able to attend, there’s another opportunity to hear John speak about his book as part of the Tumamoc Author Series on Tumamoc Hill, November 12, at 6 p.m. More details are available at the events page on our website.
Below, check out some photos from the event:
More than 120 people attended the event on Tuesday, October 21 in the Special Collections reading room.
Dean Shan Sutton gave the opening remarks and reflected on John Schaefer’s impact on the University of Arizona.
John P. Schaefer, president emeritus of the University of Arizona, read from his new memoir and shared personal stories from his time as president and from his childhood.
Schaefer signed books for a long line of community members after his presentation.
Thank you to all of the Tucson community members who came out to celebrate and make this event so special! Check out our website’s events page for information about the next opportunity to meet our wonderful authors.
John P. Schaefer was only thirty-six years old when he assumed the role of fifteenth president of the University of Arizona in 1971. The son of hardworking German immigrants, Schaefer grew up in Queens, New York, where childhood centered on sports, academics, and the great outdoors.
Earning a PhD in chemistry in 1958, Dr. Schaefer’s career skyrocketed through the ranks of academia, moving him from junior faculty to university president in a mere decade. As president, he led the University of Arizona through a transformational period of growth and is credited with securing the university’s status as a top-tier research institution.
A Chance to Make a Difference recounts poignant, eye-opening, and often humorous stories from childhood to presidency, revealing the characteristics of an inspiring university leader.
The exhibition Laura Da’: Why Lazaruscenters the poem “Why Lazarus” (from Da’s new book, Severalty), which unfurls through the corridor space of the Urban Arts Space, poignantly located in the old Lazarus Department Store building in Downtown Columbus, Ohio. Walking alongside Da’s poem in the gallery, located on the banks of the Scioto River and the Scioto Trail (now US 23-High Street), will offer visitors a uniquely visceral experience of Shawnee spatial and temporal knowledge.
The poet and educator Laura Da’ (Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma), across three collections of poetry—Tributaries(2015), Instruments of the True Measure (2018), and Severalty(2025)—has enacted a deeply personal accounting of Shawnee history, community, and selfhood.
Grounded in the historical removal of the Shawnee from Ohio, first to Kansas and ultimately to Oklahoma, Da’s poetry offers a timely celebration of Shawnee survivance and life. Specifically, through the character of Lazarus Shale, Da’ has created a complex personality who not only embodies the history of Shawnee removal but also the vitality that is central to contemporary Indigenous creativity.
The University of Arizona Press is excited to be at the 2025 Western History Association meeting in Albuquerque this week! Find us at booth #14 to browse our latest history titles and meet with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles.
If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZWHA25 for 40% offall books, with free shipping onorders over $60.
We’re also happy to announce three opportunities to meet with our wonderful authors and get your books signed:
Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? To learn more about publishing with us, click here.
New & Featured History Titles
Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In meXicana Roots and Routes, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández edit a collection of work by established and emerging scholars drawing upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes.
The Department of Homeland Security began condemnation proceedings on the property of Dr. Eloisa Tamez, a Lipan Apache (Ndé) professor, veteran, and title holder to land in South Texas deeded to her ancestors during a time when Indigenous lands were largely taken and exploited by Spanish colonizers. In Gathering Together, We Decide, editors Margo Tamez, Cynthia Bejarano, and Jeffrey P. Shepherd spotlight powerful voices and perspectives from Ndé leaders, Indigenous elders, settler-allies, Native youth, and others associated with the Tamez family, the Ndé defiance, and the larger Indigenous rights movement to document their resistance.
Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world in Rooted in Place. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.
The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690examines a seventeenth-century Indigenous uprising in northern Mexico aimed at driving out Spanish miners, missionaries, and settlers from Tarahumara (Rarámuri) and Tepehuanes homelands. Historian Joseph P. Sánchez argues that the revolts of the Tepehuanes and the Tarahumaras in northern New Spain, or Nueva Vizcaya, were well-planned, inspired by outside events, and drew in multiple communities and ethnicities. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including Jesuit accounts and archival documents, Sánchez offers a comprehensive narrative that challenges conventional interpretations of colonial Mexican uprisings.
As debates around food sovereignty, globalization, and sustainable development intensify globally, México Between Feast and Famine provides a timely analysis that counters conventional narratives about Mexican cuisine. Enrique C. Ochoa provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico by examining the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared.
An essential read for scholars and activists alike, Mapping Neshnabé Futurity urges a rethinking of how we conceive of futurity and sovereignty. By fusing ethnography of tribal nation-building projects and analysis of Indigenous speculative fiction, Blaire Morseau provides a path to Indigenous futurisms and its role in imagining decolonization. Morseau’s analysis underscores the potency of Indigenous knowledge systems and ceremonial practices in imagining and actualizing alternative futures. This work shows how counter-mapping projects both on the ground and in the skies reclaim space in the Great Lakes region—Neshnabé homelands—and are part of larger constellations of Indigenous futurities and stories of survivance.
BorderVisions, edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. We are especially interested in books that address the complexities and richness of borderlands experiences at different historical, cultural, and sociopolitical moments. Watch a recording of the series launch for BorderVisions here.
Arizona Crossroads, edited by Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, is a series in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society that explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona. We are open to a variety of book formats: monographs, multi-authored works, and edited collections, as well as broader more synthetic works. Interdisciplinary projects that engage the past are encouraged.
Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies, edited by Jeffrey P. Shepherd and Myla Vicenti Carpio, anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity. The series editors are especially interested in works that analyze colonization, land dispossession, and oppression while foregrounding Indigenous peoples’ resistance to these processes.
Modern American West, edited by Flannery Burke and Andrew G. Kirk, seeks to advance scholarly and public understanding of the rich history of the twentieth-century American West by publishing creative works of research and synthesis. Volumes in the series are distinguished by both original research and careful analysis of existing secondary literature. The series editors seek single- or co-authored works that identify new directions for scholarship and develop new interpretive frameworks, while also providing comprehensive introductions to particular topics.
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