Category: Media

Tom Zoellner Talks Dirty Deals on Podcasts

Posted on February 28, 2023February 27, 2023 by maryreynolds

Do you want to know the historic bars and restaurants in Arizona where Tom Zoellner says, “dirty deals have gone down”? Listen to the author in conversation with the podcast hosts on Voices of the West.

Tom’s family has lived in Arizona since 1908, and he spent years as a journalist for The Arizona Republic. He knows his way around his home state and tells tales in Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona.

On the podcast, he says Arizona is not a perfect state: “I have complicated feelings about Arizona . . . there’s so many fascinating aspects to it. I wanted to capture it in all its imperfections and all its grandeur.”

Zoellner mentions Ho’zho, a spiritual state of being translated from Diné as “balance, getting your insides in tune with the outside.” Zoellner says there isn’t really an adequate English translation of the word. But in conversation with two Diné marathon runners in his book’s first chapter, he comes to a deeper understanding.

Tom will also speak with Tucson radio legend Bill Buckmaster and Tucson Weekly editor Jim Nintzel on the Buckmaster Show, 12 – 1 p.m., March 3, on KVOI AM 1030, in Tucson. Listen online, live or after air date.

The Cowboy Up podcast drops on Saturday, March 11, at high noon. Dude rancher Russell True and cowboy Alan Day will chat with Tom about how the Arizona Trail inspired his essay collection.

Listen whenever and wherever you want and go on the trail with Tom!

Extended Stay Featured in Tor.com Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Riley Brown

Tor.com calls Extended Stay by Juan Martinez a “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2023.”

Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

“This looks to be both thematically resonant and unsettling in the best possible way,” says Tobias Carroll from Tor.com.

Extended Stay Makes Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s January 2023 Book Preview

Posted on January 24, 2023January 24, 2023 by Riley Brown

Extended Stay by Juan Martinez was featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s January 2023 Book Preview.

“It’s been six years since the release of Juan Martinez’s collection Best Worst American, a book that we quite enjoyed. What’s next for Martinez? Turns out the answer is a novel about an emotionally vampiric sentient hotel that arises in the southwestern U.S. and the people who cross paths with it. And with a concept like that, it’s hard to resist delving in,” said Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

Diné Reader Editors Featured on The Academic Life podcast

Posted on January 23, 2023 by maryreynolds

Esther G. Belin and Jeff Berglund, two of the editors of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature were recently interviewed by Christina Gessler on The Academic Life podcast.

Esther G. Belin is a Diné multimedia artist and writer, and a faculty mentor in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute for American Indian She is a second-generation off-reservation Native American resulting from the U.S. federal Indian policies of termination and relocation. Her art and writing reflect the historical trauma from those policies as well as the philosophy of Saah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózho, the worldview of the Navajo people.

Jeff Berglund is the director of the Liberal Studies Program and a professor of English at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has worked since 1999. Dr. Berglund’s research and teaching focuses on Native American literature, comparative Indigenous film, and U.S. multi-ethnic literature.

About the book:

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is unprecedented. It showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose.This wide-ranging anthology brings together writers who offer perspectives that span generations and perspectives on life and Diné history. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities.

Article by Miriam Davidson Featured in The Progressive Magazine

Posted on January 19, 2023January 20, 2023 by Savannah Hicks

January 20, 2023

The Progressive Magazine recently featured an article titled “Another Senseless Death in the ‘Decon- stitutionalized Zone’” by University of Arizona Press author Miriam Davidson. Read a brief excerpt from the article below.

On the Mexican side, the continuation and expansion of the pandemic-era restriction known as Title 42—which calls for the immediate expulsion of refugees and migrants no matter their situation—has left many in dangerous limbo in squalid conditions. Some become so desperate they feel they have no choice but to try to enter the United States “without inspection” by fording the river or crossing the desert.

On the U.S. side, a series of crackdowns on drug and migrant smuggling since the mid-1990s, and especially after 9/11, has led to the creation of what activists call a “deconstitutionalized zone.” They contend the border has become a region where the rights of humans and the environment are routinely ignored in the name of fighting the drug trade and terrorism.
Miriam Davidson

Read the full article here.

Miriam Davidson is the author of The Beloved Border, a potent and timely report on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Extended Stay Featured in Book Riot

Posted on January 18, 2023 by Riley Brown

Extended Stay by Juan Martinez was featured in the article from Book Riot, “Start Your Year Off Scared: New Horror Coming Out In January,” by Emily Martin.

In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.

David Lazaroff Photographed Jellyfish in Sabino Creek

Posted on January 17, 2023January 18, 2023 by maryreynolds

The Arizona Daily Star’s #ThisIsTucson reports that Picturing Sabino author David Wentworth Lazaroff photographed tiny jellyfish in Sabino Creek. They are commonly called freshwater jellyfish— their scientific name is Craspedacusta sowerbyi— but technically speaking, they’re not really jellyfish. They look like them, they eat like them, they act like them. But they’re technically part of a different class of organisms.

Picturing Sabino tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, this work rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment.

The story is vividly told through numerous historical photographs, lively anecdotes, and an engaging text, informed by decades of research by Lazaroff.

In #ThisIsTucson, Lazaroff says of Sabino Canyon: “It has an interesting geology, biology, history— it’s a lot of interesting stuff crammed into just a few miles.” He continues, “That’s the thing talking about jellyfish. You can get wrapped up in the strangeness of these creatures, these brainless creatures that reproduce in strange ways, but then you can forget that they’re beautiful and unexpected, floating around in the water.”

Lavender Fields Shout-out in Ms. Magazine

Posted on January 16, 2023February 1, 2023 by maryreynolds

Lavender Fields: Black Women Experiencing Fear, Agency, and Hope in the Time of COVID-19 made Ms. Magazine’s January Reads for the Rest of Us. Edited by Julia A. Jordan-Zachery, Lavender Fields uses autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. It centers their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes.

Writes Karla J. Strand, “Black women have been among the hardest hit by COVID-19 and this collection illustrates the devastating ramifications with candor, compassion, heart and hope. By centering the voices, experiences and stories of Black women, Jordan-Zachery ensures they don’t go unheard.”

About the Book
Black women and girls in the United States are among the hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of illnesses, deaths, evictions, and increasing economic inequality. Riffing off Alice Walker’s telling of her search for Zora Neal Hurston, the authors of these essays and reflections offer raw tellings of Black girls’ and women’s experiences written in real time, as some of the contributors battled COVID-19 themselves.

Reyes Ramirez Featured on NPR’s Houston Matters

Posted on January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 by Savannah Hicks

January 12, 2023

University of Arizona Press author Reyes Ramirez was featured on NPR’s Houston Matters on December 15, 2022, to talk about his new short story collection The Book of Wanderers, which was recently featured on NPR’s Books We Love list.

Listen to the podcast here.

Reyes Ramirez is a Houstonian of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection, The Book of Wanderers, follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.

The University of Arizona Press