Thank you to all of the authors, faculty, students, and new friends who made time to visit our booth in Tampa this year! We are still feeling the excitement around all the rich discussion of foodways, migration, labor, Indigeneity, environment, language, extractive industries, and multispecies relationships.
If you weren’t able to visit our booth, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZAAA24 at checkout until 12/18/24.
Below, enjoy the roundup of photos from the event! Did we miss a great photo of you at the conference? Tag @AZPress on social media so we can share it!
We had lots of goodies to give away at our booth this year, including new bookmarks featuring Leigh McDonald’s gorgeous cover design for Amber McCrary’s forthcoming Blue Corn Tongue.
The Association of University Presses’s theme for this year’s University Press Week, November 11-15, is ”Step UP.” See the complete list of Step UP books here. The Step UP list of 123 publications represent the many areas in which university presses and their authors #StepUP. According to the Association, “These publications and projects, selected by AUPresses members, give context to current issues and events, offer solutions to global challenges, and present diverse voices in a broad range of disciplines.” Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation by Stephen H. Storm is featured in the Science & Environment section of the Step UP list. Forging a Sustainable Southwest introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs. See photos below from this book.
The University of Arizona Press hosts the Association of University Presses’s Book, Jacket, and Journal Show for the month of November. We’re thrilled that University of Arizona designer Leigh McDonald’s jacket design and Porter McDonald’s interior drawings for Rim to Riverby Tom Zoellner received an award. The show honors exemplary works created by the university press community in 2023. It is all part of our celebration of University Press Week, Nov. 11 – 15. The award-winning books are on display at the Press offices on the 5th Floor of the University of Arizona Main Library. The winners are also on virtual display here.
Check out a few of the winning designs below, and a photo of the display at the Press offices.
October 30, 2024
Thanks to all the authors, editors, and new friends who visited our booth at the Western History Association Conference in Kansas City last weekend! Below, check out a few highlights from the conference:
And finally, a throwback to last year’s conference in Los Angeles! Can you spot University of Arizona Press Publicity Manager, Mary Reynolds, in the photos above?
Celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month with new books from the University of Arizona Press! Celebrated annually from September 15 to October 15, the month aims to recognize “the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America” (learn more at the National Hispanic Heritage Month website). The theme for 2024 is “Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together.”
Each of the books below takes the reader on a journey of personal and shared history, highlighting our authors’ diverse experiences and recognizing the impact of Hispanic culture on our country.
A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. In They Call You Back, Hernandez continues his search for the 1948 Los Gatos Canyon plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.
Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories,The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.
The first English-language collection of Latina/x caregiving testimonios, this volume gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios speak to the tragic flaws in our health-care system and the woefully undervalued labor of providing care to family and community. Testimonios of Caregives voice to those who often are voiceless in histories of caregiving and is guided by Chicana and Latina feminist principles, which include solidarity between women of color, empathy, willingness to challenge the patriarchal medical health-care systems, questioning traditional gender roles and idealization of familia, and caring for self while caring for loved ones and community. The book is edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa, Yvette G. Flores, and Angie Chabram
The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. This collection of essays, edited by Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales, bridges both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. In Frontera Madre(hood), thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice.
Working in community is critical to several fields. Working en comunidad, edited by Elena Foulis, Stacey Alex, and Glenn A. Martínez, focuses on service-learning and Latina/o/e communities within a variety of institutional contexts. It provides a practical framework grounded in theoretical approaches that center Latina/o/e experiences as foundational to understanding how to prepare students to work in the community and en comunidad. The volume tackles three major themes: ethical approaches to working with Latina/o/e communities within language courses and beyond; preparing Latina/o/e students for working with their own communities in different environments; and ensuring equitable practices and building relationships that are mutually beneficial for students and community members.
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United Statestakes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. Author Rafael A Martínez follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”
“Pioneers of Change” photo credit in lead image: Mariana I. Purcell Rivera, Puerto Rican artist and architecture student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico
The University of Arizona Press staff recently had the opportunity to visit Carina A. Bennett and Cat W.V. Wolner, two of the five authors of Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid, at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in the Gerard P. Kuiper Space Sciences Building! Below, you can see photos from the tour, including a map of the asteroid Bennu’s surface, a close-up look at some of the sample collected from Bennu, and the powerful microscopes used to analyze and image the sample.
A major highlight of the tour was seeing a vial of sample collected from the Bennu asteroid. Bennett and Wolner revealed that, among many surprises, researchers have discovered that the asteroid is more like a “rubble pile” held together by microgravity and loose cohesion, rather than a solid rock.
Photo credit: Sara ThaxtonPhoto Credit: Sara Thaxton
Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. In 2020 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Bennu and collected pristine asteroid material for delivery to Earth in September 2023.
Like a map of the planet Earth, the asteroid Bennu is depicted here in stunning high resolution. Author Carina A. Bennett explains how it took around 2,500 individual images to create this massive picture.
Bennett explains how the OSIRIS-REx team selected a location to collect a sample from the asteroid.
Below, members of the Press admire commemorative posters designed by Heather Roper, celebrating milestones of the OSIRIS-REx mission.
Our staff was also delighted to find not one, but two Guinness World Record certificates hanging in the halls of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory offices!
And finally, the tour concluded with a visit to the basement where we saw some extremely powerful microscopes. This equipment is stored below ground level to avoid vibrations, which is of utmost importance when analyzing images as small as 100 nanometers—far, far smaller than the width of a human hair.
Images of very tiny asteroid sampleOur staff in the LPL basementA very powerful microscope that cuts material with an ion beamThe microscope operator shows where the sample is mountedCan you spot the sample? It’s a tiny speck, just to the right of the prong second from the left.
Thanks for coming along with us on this virtual version of the tour! If all of these pictures have inspired you with a sense of wonder about the mysteries of the cosmos, check out our incredible list of space science books!
Summer means road trip! Here are a few University of Arizona Press titles to inspire you to explore the beautiful state of Arizona. Start with a trip closest to the University of Arizona and Tucson at Sabino Canyon, quench your thirst with Arizona adult beverages, admire the towering geology of the Grand Canyon State, then finish with a hike on the Arizona Trail. For the last one, stick to higher elevations to stay cool. Even if it’s too hot to drive, tag along with these authors for a journey that is virtual the old-fashioned way: in the pages of a great book.
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 David Wentworth Lazaroff.
Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. Author Tom Zoellner’s trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, honky-tonk dreamers, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.
Since 1864, the state’s breweries have had a history as colorful as the state. With an eye like a historian, the good taste of a connoisseur, and the tenacity of a dedicated collector, author Ed Sipos serves up beer history with gusto. Brewing Arizonais the first book of Arizona beer. It includes every brewery known to have operated in the state, from the first to the latest, from crude brews to craft brews, from mass beer to microbrews. This eye-opening chronicle is encyclopedic in scope but smooth in its delivery. Like a fine beer, the contents are deep and rich, with a little froth on top.
Whether you have climbed these peaks many times, enjoy seeing them from your car window, or simply want to learn more about southwestern geology and history, reading Natural Landmarks of Arizona is a fascinating way to learn about the ancient and recent history of beloved places such as Cathedral Rock, Granite Dells, Kitt Peak, and many others. With David Yetman as your guide, you can tuck this book into your glove box and hit the road with profound new knowledge about the towering natural monuments that define our beautiful Arizona landscapes.
Paging through our Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 catalogs, you will see a variety of modern and historic Nahuatl images. Several covers include an image known as a glyph representing communication: a circular swirl, like a breath of air, often placed near the mouths of human figures. This glyph is even visible just outside the University of Arizona Press offices in a newly installed art piece.
InIndigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them, editor Kelly McDonough writes that the Nahuatl language was spoken throughout Mexico and much of Central America before Spanish colonization, and more than 2.5 million people speak Nahuatl today. The root “nahua” means “audible, intelligible, clear.” (Karttunen, Frances 1992, An analytical dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman: University of Oklahoma Pres, 156–157).
Writing that Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies by L Heidenreich and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz emphasizes practice: how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx history paper; how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx literature or cultural studies essay; and how to conduct interviews, frame pláticas, and conduct oral histories. The authors offer an alternative to handbooks written with white, Eurocentric frameworks and/or from a white, Eurocentric lens. To emphasize the Chicanx and Latinx focus, the book is illustrated with images by Anel Flores using Nahuatl, a language that predates European contact. Flores used the Nahuatl glyph for communication illustrating a conversation between two people. It is a circular swirl, like a breath of air. Flores also created versions of the glyph for the front cover art; UA Press Art Director Leigh McDonald incorporated the glyph into the final cover design:
Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana–led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis weaves together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. The book crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays. Editors Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda selected a painting by Margaret Alarcón for their cover, with the Nahuatl communication glyph at the center:
Kelly S. McDonough reveals how Nahuas have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods in Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them. In this work, she address Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources like the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The cover features illustrations of Nahuatl glyphs from the Florentine Codex:
Edward Anthony Polanco, author of Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660, requested Nahua art on the cover of his book. Historian Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl, to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih (healing specialists), tiçiyotl (healing knowledge), and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. The author commissioned the cover art from an artist in the Nahua community in Panchimalco, El Salvador. In the painting, the Nahuatl communication glyph emanates from two women’s mouths. This book will be published in Fall 2024:
Finally new art installed in our central staircase in the Main University of Arizona Libraries last year reminds the University of Arizona Press staff about the importance of communication. Located on the same floor as the UA Press office, “Desert Dwellers, 2023” by Carlos Valenzuela and Jennifer Dwyer is one of four mosaics. The prickly pear cactus has the Nahuatl glyph for communication on its pads and fruits, perhaps showing that the desert plants and animals communicate with each other and with us:
The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) selected the hard cover version of Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona by Tom Zoellner, to be part of the 2024 Book Jacket and Journal Show. Leigh McDonald, Art Director and Book Designer at The University of Arizona Press, designed the cover and the interior of the book. Porter McDonald created the cover illustration and interior illustrations. This book was honored in the category for 2024 Trade Typographic Selections. The full book jacket is pictured above.
The 2024 Book, Jacket and Journal Show will be on display at the AUPresses Annual Meeting in Montreal, June 11-14. The show will then be on tour for the next year, hosted by university presses in the United States and Canada. The University of Arizona Press will host the show; however, the date has not been finalized.
Victor Mingovits, one of the judges, said, “While some books immediately caught our eye and made the short list, others sparked lively discussions. We were particularly drawn to those designs that revealed their brilliance over time, prompting us to reconsider what makes a design truly successful. These unexpected gems left a lasting impression, drawing us back for more as their unique design unfolded with each reading.”
AUPresses advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association envisions a world that values the many ways that scholarship enriches societies, institutions, and individuals.
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May 2, 2024
Last week was the 2024 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies conference in San Francisco. Thank you to the authors, editors, contributors, and new friends who spent time at our booth. Check out the photos and feel the vibe.
If you weren’t able to visit us at the conference, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZNACCS24 at checkout until 5/25/24.
Thanks to everyone who came by to say hello, browse books, and talk with us at the conference!
Left photo: Mexican American Studies represent! with associate professor Michelle Téllez and program coordinator Lucia Echeverria Madera. Right photo: Authors Rita Urquijo-Ruiz and Yvette Saavedra sign books for each other.
Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento editors and a future mujer de maiz.
Authors and editors signing books and one dog named Quilla, who wishes she could read all of our books!
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