Date: Saturday, April 26, 2025
Time: 4:45-5:15 p.m., PDT
Where: De Los Stage, University of Southern California, 850 W 37th St, Los Angeles, CA
Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, one of the editors of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis will speak at the Los Angeles Festival of Books panel “Protecting Your Wellbeing Today & Tomorrow.” The panel highlights inter-generational healing. After the panel at 5:15 p.m., Fe will sign books with her co-editor Nadia Zepeda at the La Liberia Booth. Amber Rose González is the third editor of the book. All book festival events are free and open to the public.
About the book:
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, this collection 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.
MdM’s political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies.
Date: Sunday, June 1, 2025
Time: 3:00-3:45 p.m., PDT
Where: Brower Center Goldman Theater, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Denise Low, author of House of Grace, House of Blood: Poems, will speak at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. She will participate in the panel “Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World,” along with Amber McCrary, Kinsale Drake, Georgina Marie Guardado, and Steven Meadows. The panel will be moderated by by Kim Shuck. Low will also moderate the panel “Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory,” featuring Jennifer Foerster, Chris La Tray, and Terra Trevor. That panel takes place 4:00-4:45 p.m. at Brower Center Goldman Theater. The events are free and open to the public.
About House of Grace, House of Blood:
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, poet Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations.
Date: Sunday, June 1, 2025
Time: 3:00-3:45 p.m., PDT
Where: Brower Center Goldman Theater, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Amber McCrary, author of Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert, will read from her work and speak at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. She will participate in the panel “Indigenous Poetry: Words that Map the Natural World,” along with Denise Low, Kinsale Drake, Georgina Marie Guardado, and Steven Meadows. The panel will be moderated by Kim Shuck. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
In a voice that is jubilant, irreverent, sometimes scouring, sometimes heartfelt, and always unmistakably her own, Amber McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place.
Date: Saturday, April 12, 2025
Time: 1:15-2:15 p.m., CDT
Where: Salazar Gallery, Central Library, UTSA Southwest Campus, 300 Augusta St., San Antonio, TX
Octavio Quintanilla will talk about his recent collection, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize, and The Book of Wounded Sparrows, at the San Antonio Book Festival on the panel “Poetry, Art, and The Border.” He will be talking with Roberto Tejada, author of Carbonate of Copper. Quintanilla served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. He holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.
Book signing will begin after the event at 2:30 p.m. in the Festival Marketplace.
About the book:
In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world.
Date: Saturday, April 12, 2025
Time: 2 p.m., CDT
Where: Elgin Community College, Building H, Classroom 123, 1700 Spartan Dr., Elgin, IL
Poet Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, is the featured Guest Speaker at the Elgin Poetry Fest. The all-day event is presented by Elgin Literacy Connection to celebrate National Poetry Month; tickets for the day are $10-80 and are available here. The festival also includes a poetry workshop led by Chasity Gunn and an evening poetry slam.
About the book:
In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.
Date: Saturday, April 5, 2025
Time: 4 – 5 p.m., EDT
Where: Third Room, 46 Wall Street, Asheville, NC
Join Tim Z. Hernandez at the Connect Beyond Festival where he will read and speak about his book, They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir. The Connect Beyond Festival celebrates art and culture through a weekend of panels, film screenings and workshops that explore the intersection of art, film and storytelling. After the reading, Hernandez will engage attendees in a fireside chat and writing exercise.
This event is open to the public with tickets ranging from $0-$50. Visit the website for more information.
About the book:
Hernandez’s mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed “a stunning piece of investigative journalism,” and the New York Times hailed as “painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendant of farmworkers.”
In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the 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.
Date: Friday, April 11, 2025
Time: 6:30 p.m., MST
Where: Museum of Northern Arizona, 31010 N. Fort Valley Road, Flagstaff, AZ
Celebrate poetry at the Northern Arizona Book Festival Featured Reading with Amber McCrary, author of Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert. She will read with authors m.s. RedCherries and Kinsale Drake. The Museum of Northern Arizona hosts the reading which is part of the four-day festival. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
In a voice that is jubilant, irreverent, sometimes scouring, sometimes heartfelt, and always unmistakably her own, Amber McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place.
Date: Saturday, April 12, 2025
Time: 1-2 p.m., CDT
Where: Swartz Stage, University of Texas, Southwest Campus, 300 Augusta Street, San Antonio, TX
Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, will be at San Antonio Book Festival on the panel “Migration and Memory.” He will be talking with Jessica Goudeau, author of We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration. Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. He is an associate professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing program.
About the book:
In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the 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.
Date: Saturday, March 1, 2025
Time: 12-5 p.m., MST
Where: Arizona Humanities House, 1242 N Central Ave., Phoenix, AZ
Celebrate the NDN Girls Book Club Blue Corn Festival with Amber McCrary, author of Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert. The Arizona Humanities House hosts the event which includes readings by Amber McCrary, Laura Tohe, author of Tséyi’ / Deep in the Rock, Alana Yazzie, and Kinsale Drake. This celebration of Diné culture, literature, and futures also features jewelry and food. The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Arizona Arts Commission and Palabras Bookstore.
About the book:
In a voice that is jubilant, irreverent, sometimes scouring, sometimes heartfelt, and always unmistakably her own, Amber McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place.
Date: Saturday, February 8, 2025
Time: 4 – 5 p.m., MST
Where: The Lyric, 1209 N College Ave , Fort Collins, CO
Devon A. Mihesuah author of Dance of the Returned and The Hatak Witches, will speak at the Fort Collins Book Festival on February 8. She will participate in the “Horror with a Twist” panel that also features Stephen Graham Jones, author of I Was a Teenage Slasher, and Lindsay King-Miller, author of The Z Word. Mihesuah’s latest novel is The Bone Picker.
This event is free and open to the public.
About Dance of the Returned:
The disappearance of a young Choctaw leads Detective Monique Blue Hawk to investigate a little-known ceremonial dance. As she traces the steps of the missing man, she discovers that the seemingly innocuous Renewal Dance is not what it appears to be. After Monique embarks on a journey that she never thought possible, she learns that the past and future can converge to offer endless possibilities for the present. She must also accept her own destiny of violence and peacekeeping.
The University of Arizona Press
