The University of Arizona Press

Date: Friday, February 16, 2024

Time: 3 – 4:30 p.m.,  PST

Where: UC Riverside Writers Week Virtual Event, register here

Kimberly Blaeser, author of of Ancient Light and Daisy Ocampo, author of Where We Belong will speak at UC Riverside’s Writers Week. (Image above shows Ocampo on the left and Blaeser on the right.) The other writer on the panel is Randi LeClair (Pawnee Nation), Filmmaker of Native stories based in rural Oklahoma. The event is free and open to the public. Register for this virtual session on Zoom.

About the books:

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.

Where We Belong brings together the history and experiences of the Chemehuevi people and their ties with Mamapukaib, or the Old Woman Mountains in the East Mojave Desert, and the Caxcan people and their relationship with Tlachialoyantepec, or Cerro de las Ventanas, in Zacatecas, Mexico. Through a trans-Indigenous approach, Daisy Ocampo weaves historical methodologies (oral histories, archival research, ethnography) with Native studies and historic preservation to reveal why Native communities are the most knowledgeable and transformational caretakers of their sacred places.

When: Thursday, September 28

Time: 10 a.m., EDT

Where: Zoom, register here

College of the Holy Cross presents this month’s “Author Meets Critics session,” which will focus on Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith by Eric Hoenes del Pinal. Another exciting panel of critics will share their thoughts on the book, including Kristy Nabhan-Warren of the University of Iowa, Katherine Dugan of Springfield College, and Kinga Povedák of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

About the book:

In Guarded by Two Jaguars, Eric Hoenes del Pinal tells the story of this dramatic split and in so doing addresses the role that language and gesture have played in the construction of religious identity. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, the author examines how the introduction of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the parish produced a series of debates between parishioners that illustrate the fundamentally polyvocal nature of Catholic Christianity. This work examines how intergroup differences are produced through dialogue, contestation, and critique. It shows how people’s religious affiliations are articulated not in isolation but through interaction with each other.

When: Thursday, August 24

Time: 10:30 -11:30 a.m., CDT

Where: South Dakota Humanities Council, on zoom

Sarah Hernandez will discuss her book, We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition on zoom with the South Dakota Humanities Council (SDHC). The event is part of the SDHC’s weekly Brainstorming The Humanities program. Sarah Hernandez, assistant professor of Native American literature and the director of the Institute for American Indian Research at the University of New Mexico, joins SDHC Scholar Lawrence Diggs to discuss her book. Sarah is also a member of the Oceti Sakowin Writers’ Society, an Oceti Sakowin-led nonprofit for Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers.

The South Dakota Humanities Council featured We are the Stars as their state’s selection for the 2023 National Book Festival’s “Great Reads from Great Places.”

About the book:

Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.

Date: Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Time: 10:00 – 11:30 a.m., AZT

Where: Register to receive Zoom link

Rita Cantu of the Border Community Alliance Literature and Film Club will interview Tom Zoellner about his book, Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona. The virtual event is free and open to the public.

Not only is the book a quest for the origin of Arizona’s enigmatic name, but it’s also a probing look into the past: the roots of the state’s colorful politics, literary heritage, music, cuisine, geology, and complex mix of races and traditions—the whole dazzling combination of elements that make the 48th state a prism of the past and unique laboratory of the future.

Book excerpt:

Here it was at last. I would be hiking across the Kaibab Plateau, down and out of the Grand Canyon, past the cinder cone of Humphreys Peak, across Anderson Mesa, down the Mogollon Rim, through the Mazatzals and the Superstitions, across the Black Hills of Pinal County, and then up and over four major ranges in succession: the Catalinas, the Rincons, the Santa Ritas, and the Huachucas to the Mexican border and then—hopefully—the spot in the valley that poured forth silver for about a week and from which the state had taken its beguiling name.