Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Time: 12 p.m., MST
Where: Arizona Historical Society virtual event
Cynthia Radding, author of Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain, will speak on “Spiritual Geographies and Imperial Borderlands in the Sonoran Desert,” as part of the Arizona Historical Society’s summer history talks. This summer, the series focuses on the Spanish period in Arizona. The event is free, but donations are welcome at registration. Register here for this virtual event.
About the book:
Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.
Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Time: 10:00-11:30 a.m., MST
Where: Online via Zoom, register here
Ken Lamberton will speak about his book, Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz, at a virtual event hosted by the Borderlands Literature & Film Circle. Lamberton holds degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Arizona and lives with his wife in a 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee. The event is free, but the suggested donation is $10. Register to receive Zoom link.
About the book:
Ken Lamberton finds his way through a lifetime of exploring southern Arizona’s Santa Cruz River. This river—dry, still, and silent one moment, a thundering torrent of mud the next—serves as a reflection of the desert around it: a hint of water on parched sand, a path to redemption across a thirsty landscape.
With his latest book, Lamberton takes us on a trek across the land of three nations—the United States, Mexico, and the Tohono O’odham Nation—as he hikes the river’s path from its source and introduces us to people who draw identity from the river—dedicated professionals, hardworking locals, and the author’s own family. These people each have their own stories of the river and its effect on their lives, and their narratives add immeasurable richness and depth to Lamberton’s own astute observations and picturesque descriptions.
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: Thursday, May 1, 2025
Time: 4:30 p.m., PDT
Where: Shields Library, 205, 100 NW Quad, University of California, Davis, CA
Tim Z. Hernandez will talk about his book They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, for the 2024-25 Creative Writing Series at the Shields Library at UC Davis. He will also take time to answer questions from the audience about his work. Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. His books include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award. His work has been featured in international media, and in 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his work locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos. Hernandez is an associate professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing program.
This event will be available in-person and livestreamed via Zoom. It is free and open to the public.
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.
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, 18, 2025
Time: 5-7 p.m.,
Where: Northland Pioneer College, Winslow Campus (LC101), 400 E 3rd St, Winslow, AZ, with live stream at Show Low Campus (Ponderosa 101), 1001 W. Deuce of Clubs, Show Low, AZ, and via Webex
Amber McCrary, author of Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert, will read from her book for Poetry Night at Northland Pioneer College. McCrary is of the Kin Łichíí’nii clan, born for the Naakaii Dine’é clan. She is the founder of Abalone Mountain Press and is an award-winning poet dedicated to uplifting Indigenous voices. To participate via Webex, use password Poet. Light refreshments will be served for in-person guests.
About the book:
Journeying from the Colorado Plateau to the Sonoran Desert and back again, Blue Corn Tongue invokes the places, plants, and people of Diné Bikéyah and O’odham jeweḍ in a deeply honest exploration of love, memory, and intimacy confronting the legacy of land violence in these desert homelands.
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 12-1 p.m., MST
Where: via Zoom, register here for link
Brian Haley will speak about his book, Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field, as part of the 2025 Arizona Author Series. Haley is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Oneonta and a leading scholar of the appropriation of Indigenous identities by people with non-Native histories. He is the author of Reimagining the Immigrant: The Accommodation of Mexican Immigrants in Rural America and the co-editor of Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries. Haley’s presentation is a virtual event that can be accessed via Zoom. At the end of his presentation, he will answer questions from participants. This presentation will be recorded and made available on the State of Arizona Research Library YouTube channel.
About the book:
Exploring the new social field that developed to spread these ideas, Hopis and the Counterculture meticulously traces the trajectories of figures such as Ammon Hennacy, Craig Carpenter, Frank Waters, and the Firesign Theatre, among others. Drawing on insights into the interplay between primitivism, radicalism, stereotyping, and identity, Haley expands on concepts from scholars such as Roy Harvey Pearce’s notion of “isolated radicals” and Jonathan Friedman’s observations regarding the ascendancy of primitivism amid global crises. Haley scrutinizes the roles played by non-Hopi actors and the timing behind the widespread popularization of Hopi religious practices.
Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Time: 2-3 p.m., MST
Where: Online via Zoom
Rafael Martínez will talk about his book Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, as part of ASU Library’s online “Beyond the Bookshelf” series. Martínez is an assistant professor of Southwest Borderlands in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at ASU. His work focuses on immigrant rights, mixed-status families, and Latinx cultural and historical productions in the Southwest borderlands. This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register to receive the Zoom link here.
About the book:
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book 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.”
Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Time: 7 p.m., CST
Where: Register for Zoom event here
Octavio Quintanilla, author of Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, will talk about his new book with Monique Quintana in this virtual event. This event will be via Zoom video. The free event is sponsored by WritingWorkshops.com. Quintanilla served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.
About the book:
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. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing.
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.
Date: Friday, March 7, 2025
Time: 12 p.m., CST
Where: Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA and via livestream
Meena Khandelwal, author of Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India, will speak at the Iowa City Public Library on “Climate Change, Gender and Biomass Cookstoves in India.” The event is sponsored by the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council (ICFRC) and presented in partnership with The University of Iowa Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. The event is free and open to the public and will also be available via livestream. Doors open at 11 a.m., and lunch will be provided. Please RSVP here for in-person event by March 5, 2025.
About the book:
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.
Meena Khandelwal employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.
Date: Friday, February 28, 2025
Time: 5 p.m., MST
Where: Register for Zoom event here
Octavio Quintanilla, author of Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, will read as part of The YMCA Writers Voice virtual event. This event will be via Zoom video. Quintanilla served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.
About the book:
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. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing.
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.
The University of Arizona Press
