Category: Media

‘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.

Andrew Flachs Talks ‘Cultivating Knowledge’ and more on Landscapes Podcast

Posted on June 20, 2022August 5, 2024 by Mari Herreras

June 17, 2022

Landscapes with Adam Cato featured a recent interview with University of Arizona Press author Andrew Flachs on his study of the role of seeds on farmer livelihoods in rural India as part of his book, Cultivating Knowledge.

In Cultivating Knowledge Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture.

From Landscapes:

An article in Scientific American bringing a science and technology studies lens to Genetically Modified Organisms, provoked louder than normal responses from the pro biotech crowd. What can we learn from the exchange? Dr. Andrew Flachs, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, studied the role of seeds on farmer livelihoods in rural India as part of his book, Cultivating Knowledge. We discuss the arguments of the article and its malcontents to try and reach a broader understanding of what this debate is really about.

Listen to the podcast here.

KUOW NPR Continues ‘Sound of Exclusion’ Conversation in Interview with Christopher Chávez

Posted on May 2, 2022April 27, 2022 by Mari Herreras

May 2, 2022

Christopher Chávez sat down recently with KUOW NPR’s Soundside host Libby Denkmann to discuss his new book, The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

From Soundside:

Chavez explains that as radio grew to become widely used, it immediately went heavily commercial, despite some organizations and universities producing educational content.

“You had a framework of educational radio, these smaller systems that were meant to serve a social good … The 1967 Radio Broadcasting Act was meant to ensure some kind of framework for these stations. They would provide some sort of funding to basically serve a need that commercial radio couldn’t. They would do it through civic discourses, they would serve disenfranchised publics. They were meant to serve as an alternative to the commercial radio system.”

But Professor Chavez notes that, often, the most educated, socially connected, and people with cultural and economic capital have had easy access to the public media system.

“Even today, those are the folks that tend to be overrepresented in political discourses … so you have the people that are living in rural areas, that are poor, that are ethnic minorities, that are often not included in those kinds of civic discourses.”

To listen to the full conversation, go here.

Roberto Rodriguez Featured in 5 CALÓ Questions

Posted on April 28, 2022April 27, 2022 by Mari Herreras

April 28, 2022

CALÓ News, a groundbreaking news initiative of the Latino Media Collaborative (LMC), featured University of Arizona Press author Roberto Cintli Rodríguez on his work with the Raza Killings Database Project to find a more accurate number on how many Latinos are being killed by law enforcement nationwide.

Rodriguez’s book, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence, describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. County sheriffs. It also includes testimonies from other victims and survivors of police brutality and state-sponsored violence.

From CALÓ News:

When I researched, I went to the 1950s, 1940s and 1930s. You’re talking about mass lynchings, you’re talking about mass deportations of Latinos. All that history most people don’t know. All that land belonged to Mexican peoples or Native peoples. How did they lose it? A lot of it was literally by force. It’s an ugly history for African Americans, Native peoples and Mexicanos. That’s our history.

So it’s not a recent thing. We’ve all been fighting it and the media in a way is clueless because they think it’s a competition or something new.

Our struggles are not only related, but we’re related to other struggles, too. The connections were already there, the American Indian Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, and you go back, also in Mexico with the Mexican student movement, the Mexican liberation movements at the time.

In this country, there’s three groups that have always been under attack. For the longest time, it was indigenous, Black, and Brown people. Now, it’s Asian again. So for me, that is like a natural alliance.

Read the entire interview here.

Watch: Christopher Chávez’s ‘The Sound of Exclusion’ Featured in PubWest Event

Posted on April 27, 2022April 27, 2022 by Mari Herreras

April 27, 2022

PubWest recently teamed up with Vancouver, B.C.’s Massy Books for an author reading and Q&A event with three authors focusing on history and biography, especially titles from underrepresented authors. Included was University of Arizona Press author Christopher Chávez and his new book, The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

Food Bank News Shares Story of ‘Sowing the Seeds of Change’

Posted on April 26, 2022April 26, 2022 by Abby Mogollon

April 26, 2022

A leading newsletter for America’s food banks has shared word of Seth Schindler’s Sowing the Seeds of Change. In an article published by Food Bank News Schindler explains how he came to write about the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (CFB) and why it was so important to chronicle the history of this important community organization.

“I realized that the story of the CFB was much bigger, more complex and intriguing than I originally thought. I learned about the enormity of the problem of food insecurity in the U.S. and in Arizona, which shocked me; then the surprising massive scale and diversity of the CFB’s operations throughout southern Arizona; and finally its reputation as a national leader and innovator in the food bank movement, admired for its groundbreaking work in attacking the root causes of food insecurity,” says Schindler.

Read the complete article.

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe Featured on OsiyoTV

Posted on April 25, 2022April 25, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

April 25, 2022

University of Arizona Press author Sara Sue Hoklotubbe was featured on the Cherokee Nation’s OsiyoTV, speaking about her mystery novel series and her process as a writer. About Sara 5and her books, Osiyo TV said this:

Sara Hoklotubbe is a mystery writer whose books earn high praise from readers and critics alike. She aims to dispel myths often written about Natives while staying true to Cherokee culture through her characters. Her protagonist, Sadie Walela, does just that as a sharp Cherokee woman with an eye for solving crimes.

Watch the video below!

The University of Arizona Press