Category: Media

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.

Extended Stay Featured in Most Anticipated Chicago Books

Posted on January 9, 2023 by maryreynolds

Chicago Review of Books says Extended Stay, by Juan Martinez, is one of the Most Anticipated Chicago Books of 2023! Martinez teaches at Northwestern University, but his novel takes place in Las Vegas.

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.

Martinez says, “I walked the length of Las Vegas and interviewed the people who worked and hustled along the way; those interviews very much informed the novel.”

Vox.com Features Interview with John Fleck

Posted on October 14, 2022October 13, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

October 14, 2022

Vox.com recently featured Science Be Dammed and an interview with author John Fleck and Benji Jones in their article “How a 100-year-old miscalculation drained the Colorado River”.

“…this was a stunning revelation for me. The very bottom of the river, where it leaves the United States and enters Mexico, used to be this vast delta — wild and wet and full of beavers and marshes and estuaries. But the river now stops at a place called Morelos Dam, on the US-Mexico border. Downstream from the dam there’s a little trickle of water that’s maybe 10 to 15 feet wide, and then it peters out into the sand. Then you just have dry riverbed. That’s because we’ve taken all the water out of the river upstream to use in our cities and farms.”
John Fleck

Read the entire article here.

Devon Mihesuah on Native American Calling

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Abby Mogollon

October 10, 2022

Native American Calling (NAC), the live call-in program that offers thought-provoking national conversation about issues specific to Native communities, included author Devon Mihesuah and her newest work Dance of the Returned in their New on the Native Bookshelf feature. In this new detective novel, Mihesuah (Choctaw) puts tribal tradition into a suspenseful contemporary light. The episode also includes conversations with Chelsea Hicks (Wazhazhe) and Tiffany Midge (Hunkpapa Lakota), who discuss their new works.

Mihesuah tells NAC host Shawn Spruce, “I like to create positive role models. As a writer, I have a responsibility to project positivity and strength and accuracy in how Native women really are and can be. So I created Monique Blue Hawke because she’s a problem solver. I’m looking to create someone people say ‘I really like her. I want to be like her!’ “

Listen to the full episode:
https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/friday-october-7-2022-new-on-the-native-bookshelf/#

NPR’s Books We Love Featured ‘Book of Wanderers’

Posted on August 31, 2022August 29, 2022 by Mari Herreras

August 31, 2022

National Public Radio’s Books We Love recently featured Reyes Ramirez‘s The Book of Wanders on its Best Books 2022 list.

On Wanderers:

It’s tempting to describe the tales in this masterful debut collection of short stories as both of and for our current moment. But this painterly illumination of culture, heritage, language and humanity isn’t of the zeitgeist; rather, it tells a profound truth about the many realities constituting Latino/a/Hispanic life in the Americas. Hop on the surrealist bus to understanding that Reyes Ramirez conjures for us, and you’ll hear echoes of Dashiell Hammett, Gabriel García Márquez and Alfonsina Storni. But ultimately, Ramirez’s short story collection is singular, and the real deal.

Read the entire list here.

Terrain.org Features Review of Valerie Martínez’s ‘Count’

Posted on August 18, 2022August 11, 2022 by Mari Herreras

August 18, 2022

Literary and arts magazine Terrain.org recently featured a review of Valarie Martínez’s book-length poem Count.

From the review:

Martínez’s brilliance, beyond her lyrical lines, is her querencia, her deep love of people and place, which moves us to a deep longing. Through the poet’s personal narration, science, and mythic story, we also understand even more deeply the drastic impacts of climate change.

… Can we also, in our own disintegrating world, find lasting balance and beauty? Through a powerful poetry both of sorrow and hope, Count helps us believe we can—if we are collective in our response. If we too have a deep love of people and place.

Read the entire review here.

‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-editor Julies Swarstad Johnson Talks Stars and Poetry with Lowell Observatory

Posted on August 16, 2022August 11, 2022 by Mari Herreras

August 16, 2022

The Lowell Observatory’s Star Stuff Podcast recently featured an interview with University of Arizona Press co-editor and poet Julie Swarstad Johnson, who recently served as Lowell Observatory’s Poet in Residence this summer.

Swarstad Johnson is co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, a trailblazing anthology of poetry that spans from the dawn of the space age to the imagined futures of the universe. The anthology offers a fascinating record of both national mindsets and private perspectives as poets grapple with the promise and peril of U.S. space exploration across decades and into the present. Tracing an arc of literary skepticism during the Apollo era and before to a more curious, and even hopeful, stance today, Beyond Earth’s Edge includes diverse perspectives from poets such as Robert Hayden, Rae Armantrout, N. Scott Momaday, Adrienne Rich, Tracy K. Smith, Ray Bradbury, May Swenson, Pablo Neruda, and many other engaging poetic voices.

Listen to the interview here.

NYT Magazine Recently Featured ‘Sister Song’ By Casandra López

Posted on July 29, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 26, 2022

Casandra López‘s poem “Sister Song,” from her collection Brother Bullet published by the University of Arizona Press, was recently featured in New York Times Magazine.

Poet Victoria Chang, who selected the poem, had this to say about the format of “Sister Song”:

The ghazal is a formal poem that has roots in seventh-century Arabia and was often sung by musicians. The poet Agha Shahid Ali introduced the form to America. “Ghazal” literally means “the cry of a gazelle” as it is being chased and about to die. Like many formal poems such as the sonnet, the ghazal, with its restrictions, can paradoxically illuminate and parse difficult emotions. In López’s poem, the emotion is grief — a longing for and memory of a murdered brother. This poem mostly follows the parameters of a ghazal with its repeated end word, “song,” and the inside rhyme of “forever,” “far,” “marred,” etc., as well as the poet’s name or reference to the poet (“Sister”) in the final line. One way this poem breaks the rules is that each couplet doesn’t stand alone as if it were its own poem. Instead, the end of the couplets often bleed into the next stanza, linking the narratives.

Read the entire poem here.

Congratulations to Carmen Giménez on New Position with Graywolf Press

Posted on July 22, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 21, 2022

Carmen Giménez has been named Graywolf Press’s new executive director and publisher, succeeding Fiona McCrae, who retired after leading the press for 28 years.

Giménez has published three poetry collections with the University of Arizona Press: Bring Down the Little Birds, Milk and Filth, and Odalisque in Pieces.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Giménez, 51, a queer Latinx poet and editor, holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. She is a professor in the English department at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, where she teaches creative writing in the MFA program.

She was also, until recently, publisher of Noemi Press, which announced on July 5 that Giménez was stepping down 20 years after she and Evan Lavender-Smith founded the press in 2002 with the release of a single chapbook. Noemi’s mission is to promote both emerging voices and established writers with an emphasis on writers from under-represented communities, including women, BIPOC writers, and LGBTQ writers. Noemi Press, a nonprofit organization, now publishes eight books each year in the fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism categories. Its authors have been winners of, and finalists for, such awards as the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Lambda Literary Awards.

Graywolf published Giménez’s most recent collection of poetry, Be Recorder, in 2019. Be Recorder was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN/Open Book Award, the Audré Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Giménez also is the author of five other collections of poetry, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her lyric memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, won an American Book Award.

Read the entire announcement here.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Features ‘Science Be Dammed’

Posted on July 15, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 15, 2022

On the June 26, 2022 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River by Eric Kuhn, and John Fleck was featured in a segment on water shortage in the American west.

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States. It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

The University of Arizona Press