The University of Arizona Press

Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Time: 7-8:30 p.m., MST

Where: San Pedro Chapel, 5230 Ft. Lowell Rd., Tucson, AZ

Also available on Zoom, register here

Ann Lane Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art, will give an illustrated talk at the San Pedro Chapel in Tucson. Her talk is titled “Mac Schweitzer: A Mid-century Tucson Artist and Her Southwestern Anthropology Connections.” The event is sponsored by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society. Hedlund is a cultural anthropologist who collaborates with visual artists, including contemporary Indigenous weavers. She is an internationally-recognized expert on historic and modern textiles from the American Southwest. From 1997 to 2013 she served as a curator at Arizona State Museum and professor at University of Arizona, Tucson, where she also directed the nonprofit Center for Tapestry Studies. This hybrid event is in-person, and also available on Zoom (register here). No pre-registration is required for in-person attendance.

About the book:

In Tucson during the 1950s, nearly everyone knew, or wanted to know, the southwestern artist Mac Schweitzer. Born Mary Alice Cox in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921, she grew up a tomboy who adored horses, cowboys, and art. After training at the Cleveland School of Art and marrying, she adopted her maiden initials (M. A. C.) as her artistic name and settled in Tucson in 1946. With a circle of influential friends that included anthropologists, designer-craftsmen, and Native American artists, she joined Tucson’s “Early Moderns,” receiving exhibits, commissions, and awards for her artwork. When she died in 1962, Mac’s artistic legacy faded from public view, but her prize-winning works attest to a thriving career.

Author Ann Lane Hedlund draws from the artist’s letters, photo albums, and published reviews to tell the story of Mac’s creative and adventuresome life. Her watercolors, oil paintings, prints, and sculptures—a diverse body of work never before seen in public—range from naturalistic studies of Sonoran Desert animals to impressionistic landscapes to moody abstractions.

Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Time: 3-4 p.m., CDT

Register: Online here

Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968, will join the Mexican Studies Research Collective for an online talk about his book, which offers a new lens on conceptions of the Mexican state and the people. Zavala is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies and director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLAXS) at Loyola University. He has published in Southwest Philosophical Studies, Chasqui, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, and A Contracorriente: Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos.

The event is free and open to the public, and the link to register for the online talk can be found here.

About the book:

Forging a Mexican People shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico.

Through meticulous research, Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people vis-à-vis different political and social categories. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Zavala’s research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors.

When: Thursday, May 11, 1 p.m.

Where:  On Zoom

Carolyn Niethammer will present a talk about her book A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage, as part of the State of Arizona Research Library’s 2023 Arizona Author Series. Attendees are encouraged to register to receive the link to the presentation (scroll to bottom of the page). After the talk, there will be time for questions from the audience.

Tucson cuisine combines the influences and foodways of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy traditions into something wholly unique to the desert. It is no wonder, then, that Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy. In A Desert Feast, Carolyn Niethammer honors this history and shows how waves of immigrants, travelers, and settlers have shaped this confluence of flavors and techniques to create food that smells and tastes unlike anything else. In this book, she interviews farmers, chefs, families, and entrepreneurs who are dedicated to preserving and expanding Tucson cuisine.

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.