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.
Date: Saturday, February 15, 2025
Time: 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., MST
Where: Center for Creativity, 200 Mathers St., Fort Collins, CO
Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, will speak at the Center for Creativity for the Fort Collins Book Festival on February 15. He will join authors Teow Lim Goh (Bitter Creek) and Brandon Shimoda (The Afterlife is Letting Go) for a discussion on “Untold Histories: Exploring Marginalized Voices Through Memoir, Poetry, and Essay.” 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.
This event is free and open to the public.
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.
When: March 15-16, 2025
Where: The University of Arizona Campus, Tucson, AZ
Mark your calendars for the Tucson Festival of Books, a community-wide celebration of literature. As always, the festival is free to attend. Keep an eye on this page for more information about University of Arizona Press authors who will be participating in the festival, or sign up for our newsletter to get updates
In the meantime, why not check out some highlights from last year’s festival? See photos of all the amazing authors and community members who stopped by our tent.
We look forward to seeing you at this year’s festival!
Date: Sunday, November 24, 2024
Time: 1 p.m., CDT
Where: Center for Native Futures, 56 W Adams St, Chicago, IL
Kimberly Blaeser, will read from her book, Ancient Light, for the at the Center for Native Futures in Chicago. Joining in the reading are Elise Pachen and Kenzie Allen. Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member. This in-person event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
Date: Saturday, November 16, 2024
Time: 1:15 p.m., CST
Where: Texas Tent, Texas Book Festival, Austin, TX
Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, is a featured author at this year’s Texas Book Festival. He will speak on “Texas Roots, Hidden Truths: Uncovering Family Histories and Lost Legacies” with author Jessica Goudeau. A book signing at 2:15 p.m. will follow the talk. The free festival takes place in downtown Austin, along 11th Street and Congress Avenue, on November 16 and 17. 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:
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.
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: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 6-7 p.m., CDT
Where: Milkweed Books, 1011 Washington Ave. South, Suite 107, Minneapolis, MN
Kimberly Blaeser, will give a talk and read from her book, Ancient Light, at Milkweed Books in Minneapolis. Joining her in conversation is Kenzie Allen. Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member.
About the book:
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
Date: Sunday, September 29, 2024
Time: 3 p.m., EDT
Where: North Stage, Korean War Veterans Park, 277 Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn NY
Poet Diego Báez , author of Yaguareté White will read with Hala Alyan (The Moon That Turns You Back), Armen Davoudian (The Palace of Forty Pillars), and Jive Poetic (Skip Tracer) and discuss how the poem can investigate family, place, memory, and archives. The Brooklyn Book Festival panel will be moderated by Sarah Aziza. The Brooklyn Book Festival is New York City’s largest free literary festival and connects readers with local, national and international authors and publishers during the course of a celebratory literary week. The mission of the Brooklyn Book Festival is to celebrate published literature and nurture a literary cultural community through programming that cultivates and connects readers of diverse ages and backgrounds with local, national and international authors, publishers and booksellers.
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.
When: March 26-29, 2025
Where: Los Angeles, California
Join us in Los Angeles for the 2025 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference & Bookfair. Learn more about the conference at the AWP website.
About AWP:
“The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the annual destination for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers of contemporary creative writing. It includes thousands of attendees, hundreds of events and bookfair exhibitors, and four days of essential literary conversation and celebration. The AWP Conference & Bookfair has always been a place of connection, reunion, and joy, and we are excited to see the writing community come together again in Los Angeles, California in 2025.”
Date: Friday, November 15, 2024
Time: 7 p.m., PDT
Where: The 222, 222 Healdsburg Ave. Healdsburg, CA
Poet Denise Low will read from her book, House of Grace, House of Blood: Poems, for the Indigenous Thanksgiving Traditions event at The 222 in Healdsburg. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. She will join Lucille Lang Day in sharing traditions, comments, and poetry on Indigenous traditions and their connection to present-day Thanksgiving.
This is an in-person event. General tickets are $20 with the option for a student discount with I.D. Tickets are available here.
About the book:
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, 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: Monday, July 8, 2024
Time: 4:00 – 5:20 pm, CST
Where: Forum Majadas, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Víctor Montejo, author of Kidnapped to the Underworld: Memories of Xibalba, will present at the Feria Internacional del Libro en Guatemala / Guatemala International Book Fair. He will be part of the Indigenous/Afroamerican Communities panel and speak on “El conejo y la cabra: Un cuento de timador sobre la migración transnacional a los Estados Unidos” (The rabbit and the goat: a con man’s tale of transnational migration to the United States). Other panelists are Carlos Gerardo González Orellana and Tiffany D. Creegan Miller; the moderator is Dante Barrientos Tecún.
Víctor Montejo (Jakaltek Maya) is professor emeritus of Native American studies at the University of California, Davis. An internationally recognized author, his major publications include Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Critical Essays on Identity, Representation, and Leadership (2003), Entre dos Mundos (Memoria) (2021), and Mayalogue: An Interactionist Theory of Indigenous Cultures (2021).
About Kidnapped to the Underworld:
Víctor Montejo’s story recounts the near-death experience of his grandfather, Antonyo Mekel Lawuxh (Antonio Esteban), who fell gravely ill in Guatemala in the late 1920s but survived to tell his family and community what he had witnessed of the afterlife. Narrated from Antonio’s perspective, the reader follows along on a journey to the Maya underworld of Xibalba, accompanied by two spirit guides. Antonio traverses Xibalba’s levels of heaven and hell, encountering instructive scenes of punishment and reward. Infused with memory, the author illustrates Guatemala’s unique religious syncretism, exploring conceptions of heaven and hell shared between Catholicism and Indigenous Maya spirituality.
The University of Arizona Press
