The University of Arizona Press

Winner of the 2021 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets

Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak offers the insightful voice of a first-generation immigrant to the United States in both Spanish and English. The poems, both fantastical and real, create poetic portraits of historical migrants, revealing shocking and necessary insights into humanity while establishing a transatlantic dialogue with the great voices of the Spanish Renaissance.

We are thrilled that Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go.

Watch a special conversation series between the contributors to the book here, then watch editor Frederick Luis Aldama (Professor Latinx) and Mighty Peter talk about their top 5 Latinx TV shows here.

Latinx Teens examines how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. The book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad.

Read a brief interview with authors Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera here.

We are so thrilled that Latinx Teens received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Award!

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community’s emergence as political actors—from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists. This is a story of struggle and defeat, progress and joy.

The Book of Wanderers is a dynamic short story collection that shows readers what a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter can have in common. Reyes Ramirez takes readers on a journey through Houston, across dimensions, and all the way to Mars with riveting stories that unpack what it means to be Latinx in contemporary—and perhaps future—America.

Read a brief interview with the author here!

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a foundational legacy for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

Read an excerpt from the book here!

In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines National Public Radio’s professional norms and practices that situate white listeners at the center while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to two different interviews with the author here and here. Read an op-ed from the author here, then watch a recorded event that features the book here.

We are thrilled that The Sound of Exclusion received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.

Listen to Simón Ventura Trujillo and Vick Quezada discuss the project here. We are thrilled that Land Uprising received an honorable mention for the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies!

Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Empowered! examines Arizona’s recent political history and how it has been shaped and propelled by Latinos. This book shows how Latinos are mobilizing to counter proposals for Draconian immigration laws with new and innovative approaches.

Read a brief interview wit Lisa Magaña here, then watch the authors discuss the book here.

Count is a powerful book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Valerie Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future.

Read a brief interview with the poet here, then watch a recording of a book celebration event for Count here.

Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Gloria Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

Watch the poet read from her collection here!

We are thrilled that Danzirly is the gold-medal winner of the 2021 Florida Book Awards poetry section, and Danzirly also received an honorable mention for the 2021 Foreword INDIES awards!

Transversal takes a groundbreaking, disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Read a brief interview with the poet here, then watch him read from Transversal here and present at New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival here.

We are thrilled that Transversal was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN American Open Book Award, and that it was also chosen by New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2021!

Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization.

Watch poet Mara Pastor in conversation with Siomara España at International Literature Festival here, then watch the poet read from her collection here.

UNDOCUMENTS is an expansive multi-genre exploration of Greater Mexican documentality that reveals the complicated ways all Latinx peoples, including the author, become objectified within cultures. John-Michael Rivera remixes the Florentine Codex and other documents as he takes an intense look at the anxieties and physical detriments tied to immigration.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to other author read from the book here.

We are thrilled that UNDOCUMENTS won a 2021 Eugene M. Kayden Book Award, and that John-Michael Rivera was awarded by the Carolyn Woodward Pope Endowment for UNDOCUMENTS!

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to the author on NPR here. Watch the author, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, in conversation with other borderlands scholars here, then learn more about her here.

Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. For Raquel Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

We are thrilled that x/ex/exis is a 2022 Lambda Literary Awards finalist!

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor.

We are thrilled that Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!