The University of Arizona Press

October 6, 2017

As part of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15), Latinx literary champion and nationally recognized book critic Rigoberto González puts together a list of exceptional Latinx authors of note for NBC News. This year’s list includes two of our very own: Daniel Olivas’s The King of Lighting Fixtures and Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut.

The finalists for the National Book Awards were just announced, and it is a thrill to see the names of two Latinx authors: Chicana writer Erika L. Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a finalist in the Young People’s Literature category, and Cuban American writer Carmen María Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, in the Fiction category. And congratulations to Peruvian American writer Daniel Alarcón’s The King is Always Above the People, who was in the longlist for fiction.

The awards ceremony takes place November 15 in New York City, and we wish Sánchez and Machado much luck.

It’s Latino Heritage Month, and to celebrate this, below is a list of Latinx writers worth noting for their exceptional storytelling and poetry. These dozen books were recently published by small and independent presses.

September 24, 2017

In anticipation of the Hollywood release of the movie adaptation of James Clarke’s The Last Rampage, the Arizona Daily Star revisited Gary Tison’s 1978 prison break and the book that chronicled the two week’s of terror that ensued.

“Gary Tison, his three sons and his cellmate, Randy Greenawalt, walked out of Arizona State Prison in Florence on July 30, 1978, without a shot being fired.

At first it was an embarrassment to the state, then it became a nightmare.

While on the run, the Tison Gang, as they became known in the papers, murdered six people — a husband and wife and their infant son, a teen-age girl and a young honeymooning couple.”

So begins the New York Times’ 1988 review of “Last Rampage: The Escape of Gary Tison,” published nearly 30 years ago by the Houghton Mifflin Co. The University of Arizona Press has published the paperback edition of James W. Clarke’s “The Last Rampage” since 1999.

Clarke’s book is now the basis for a new movie.

On Friday, “Last Rampage: A True Crime Story,” was released in select theaters nationwide, in addition to On Demand and Digital HD. Its Tucson release has not yet been scheduled.

 Read the full feature on the Arizona Daily Star.

September 18, 2017

In the 1990s, students at UCLA, UCSB, and Stanford University went on hunger strikes to demand the establishment and expansion of Chicana/o studies departments. They also had even broader aspirations—to obtain dignity and justice for all people. These students spoke eloquently, making their bodies and concerns visible.

Breathing life into these students’ spectacular sacrifice and activism, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval talks about his new book Starving For Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity in a cover interview with Rorotoko, an online home for “cutting-edge intellectual interviews.”

In a nutshell

Starving for Justice examines three hunger strikes that took place in the 1990s on university campuses. Twenty years ago, Chicana/o, Latina/o students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford stopped eating. Anti-immigrant measures like Proposition 187, mass incarceration, rising racial and economic inequality, globalization, budget cuts, and higher tuition costs morally outraged many. Having exhausted all other mechanisms for redressing their grievances, they embraced César Chávez’s perhaps mostly widely-known and controversial tactic for creating social change—the fast or “hunger strike.”

Read the full feature on Rorotoko.

August 19, 2017

Historian Flannery Burke’s A Land Apart takes readers to the Southwest’s top tourist attractions to find out how they got there, to listen to the debates of Native people as they sought to establish independence for themselves in the modern United States, and to ponder the significance of the U.S.-Mexico border. Burke emphasizes policy over politicians, communities over individuals, and stories over simple narratives.

Burke discussed how Arizona and New Mexico came to embody what we now think of as “The Great Southwest” with travel icon Rick Steves, appearing on his radio show with fellow authors Terry Tempest Williams and Christopher Solomon.

Listen to the conversation on Travels with Rick Steves.