Event Category: Online Book Panel or Reading

Lloyd Lee on Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World

When: Tuesday, November 16 at 5:30 p.m., MST.

Where: Zoom

Diné identity in the twenty-first century is distinctive and personal. It is a mixture of traditions, customs, values, behaviors, technologies, worldviews, languages, and lifeways. It is a holistic experience. Diné identity is analogous to Diné weaving: like weaving, Diné identity intertwines all of life’s elements together. In this important new book, Lloyd L. Lee, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and an associate professor of Native American studies, takes up and provides insight on the most essential of human questions: who are we? Finding value and meaning in the Diné way of life has always been a hallmark of Diné studies. Lee’s Diné-centric approach to identity gives the reader a deep appreciation for the Diné way of life. Lee incorporates Diné baa hane’ (Navajo history), Sa’ą́h Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ǫ́n (harmony), Diné Bizaad (language), K’é (relations), K’éí (clanship), and Níhi Kéyah (land) to address the melding of past, present, and future that are the hallmarks of the Diné way of life. This study, informed by personal experience, offers an inclusive view of identity that is encompassing of cultural and historical diversity. To illustrate this, Lee shares a spectrum of Diné insights on what it means to be human. Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World opens a productive conversation on the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities.

The book can be purchased here.

Register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUkceqqpzovGtRE-fqEmzjoo8Ty_rO04Ibm

TFOB’s Authors In Conversation Features David Yetman and Tom Zoellner

Tucson Festival of Books’ virtual author series continues with authors David Yetman and Tom Zoellner, as they discuss Yetman’s new book Natural Landmarks of Arizona that celebrates the vast geological past of Arizona’s natural monuments through the eyes of a celebrated storyteller who has called Arizona home for most of his life.

When: Tuesday, November 9, 2021, 3 p.m.

Registration for the free event is required. For more information, and to register, please go here.

Virtual Book Celebration and Reading with Valerie Martínez

This virtual event celebrates the release of Count, Valerie Martínez‘s new poetry collection, a book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. Martínez, who will read, will be joined in conversation with Rigoberto Gonzaléz, Camino del Sol Series editor.

This event is free, but registration is required. Please register here. A link to join the event via Zoom will be shared with all registrants the morning of the event.

On Count:

Forty-three sections of myth-gathering, flora and fauna, accounts of climate devastation, personal narratives, witnessing, references to works of eco-art, and evocations of children unfold over the course of the book, creating a deeply nuanced image of the current climate crisis. Central to this vital work of ecopoetry is the idea of counting—counting down to the extinction of a species, counting the wonders of the natural world, counting our way back to the balance that is required to save ourselves from climate destruction. Filled with a sense of grief and sorrow for the current state of the planet, Count also offers a glimmering hope that future generations will restore our damaged environment.

With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future. This beautiful, tragic, and unusual poem is a testimonial, a warning, and a call to action that will captivate lovers of contemporary poetry and ecopoetry, environmentalists, and climate activists alike. Count skillfully calls on our collective desire to leave a livable world, filled with the potential for healing, as a legacy to the generations of children that come after us.

Deuda Natal: Book Celebration and Reading with Mara Pastor

Mara Pastor‘s Deuda Natal won the Academy of American Poets’ 2020 Ambroggio Prize, the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. The poems in Deuda Natal were translated from Spanish to English by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong.

During this virtual book celebration, Pastor will read from this new collection, and discuss the translation process with Giménez and Rosenwong. They will be joined by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, a poet, translator, and book artist.

When: Thursday, September 9, 2021, 5:30 p.m. ACT/ET

Registration for this event is required. Please register here. A Zoom event link will be sent via email to all registrants the morning of the event.

Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. The poems propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism.

Deuda Natal also reckons with the stark environmental degradation in Puerto Rico and the larger impacts of global climate change as they navigate our changing world through a feminist lens. Pastor’s work asserts a feminist objection to our society’s obsession with production and the accumulation of wealth, offering readers an opportunity for collective vulnerability within these pages.

Our poet:

Mara Pastor is a leading Puerto Rican poet, editor, and scholar, and the author of six full-length poetry books in Spanish and three bilingual collections of poetry. She is an associate professor of Spanish at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico in Ponce.

Our translators:

María José Giménez is a poet, translator, and editor whose work has received support from the NEA, the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Assistant translation editor of Anomaly and author of CHELATED (Belladonna*), María José is the 2019–21 poet laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Anna Rosenwong is a translator and developmental editor. Her work has been honored with the Best Translated Book Award, the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her publications include Rocío Cerón’s Diorama and here the sun’s for real, selected translations of José Eugenio Sánchez. Her scholarly and creative work has been featured in such venues as World Literature Today, the Kenyon Review, and Modern Poetry Today.

Our guest:

Nicole Cecilia Delgado is a poet, translator, and book artist. Her latest book Periodo Especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora) explores the socioeconomic mirror images between the Greater Antilles in light of Puerto Rico’s ongoing financial crisis. Her work has been translated into English, Catalan, Polish, German, Galician, and Portuguese. With the poet Amanda Hernández, she currently directs and develops La Impresora, a poetry press and risograph print shop dedicated to small-scale editorial work and allocating resources to support local independent publishing, and from which they also organize the Independent and Alternative Book Fair in Puerto Rico (FLIA PR).

From the Border: An Open Book Summer Roundtable

In this one-hour panel discussion, participants will reflect on and answer questions that illuminate borderlands studies and scholarship today. Participants will answer questions such as: What is the state of borderland studies today? What are the works that have been foundational to Borderlands Studies? What does it mean to be a borderlands scholar? What is the work that needs to be done? Why is borderland studies important? And finally, what would “open” borderlands scholarship look like?

This virtual event is free and will take place on Zoom. Please register here.

Wednesday, July 14
3 pm PST, Free Live Event Via Zoom

Panelists
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Fonseca-Chávez is the author of Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture: Looking Through the Kaleidoscope. She is the author of the essay “Reflections on Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest,” which was published as part of Open Arizona.

Maurice S. Crandall is an assistant professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth. He is the author of These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912. He is the author of the essay “Reflections on The Social Organization of the Western Apache and Grenville Goodwin Among the Western Apache: Letters from the Field,” which was published as part of Open Arizona.

Yvette J. Saavedra is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Saavedra is the author of Pasadena Before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890. She is also the author of the essay “Spanish Colonial Tucson: Shifting the Paradigms of Borderlands History,” which was published as part of Open Arizona.

Open Arizona
This event caps a three-year publishing project from the University of Arizona Press called Open Arizona. Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles emphasize the relevance of the southwestern United States to understanding contemporary American life. Several works in Open Arizona include new original essays by leading scholars, offering contemporary reflections on these once out-of-print works, including some foundational works in Border Studies.

Latinx Pop Culture presents UNDOCUMENTS with John-Michael Rivera

Join this special evening to celebrate the book release of UNDOCUMENTS with a reading a discussion with its author John-Michael Rivera.

When: Wednesday, March 31, 2021, 6:30 p.m. MST

This online event is part of our Spring 2021 Event Series. This event is free via Zoom, but registration is required.

While grappling with anxiety and the physical and mental health consequences of the way the United States treats immigrant bodies, John-Michael Rivera documents and scrutinizes what it means to seek opportunities in America. With a focus on the poetics of Latinx documentality itself, this book is concerned with the complicated and at times contradictory ways peoples of Greater Mexico have been documented and undocumented within systems of colonial knowledges, and how these peoples have been rendered as specters of the bureaucratic state. Rivera takes us through the painful, anxiety-ridden, and complex nature of what it means to be documented or undocumented, and the cruelty married to each of these states of being.

Author Rivera will read from his new book. University of Arizona Press author Frederick Luis Aldama will moderate the event.

UNDOCUMENTS is part of the University of Arizona Press Latinx Pop Culture Series, co-edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama.

Latinx Pop Culture is a series that aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

To register, visit here.

Remembering Francisco X. Alarcón with Poets Responding

Poets Responding, founded by the late Francisco X. Alarcón in response to Arizona’s SB 1070 law, brought poets together throughout the world to respond against the anti-immigration law through poetry. In 2016, the University of Arizona Press published a collection of those poems, Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, co-edited by Alarcón and poet Odilia Galván Rodríguez.

To celebrate and remember Alarcón, Poets Responding has created a virtual event continuing its tradition of celebrating poetry of resistance.

When: Saturday, Jan. 30, 2021, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Standard Time

Registration is required in order to receive a Zoom link. To register, send an email to attend or read to poetryofresistance2016@gmail.com.

From Poets Responding:

Poets brought together by the late Francisco X. Alarcón, originally gathered here in 2010 in solidarity to respond to the then proposed Arizona SB 1070, a racist law that targeted immigrants and further legalized racial profiling. A law which was eventually passed and spread to other states seeking to further discriminate against BIPOC people by using the pretext of “reasonable suspicion” – of a person being an “illegal” in the US – merely because of the way they look. As the years progressed, we’ve continued to address other issues such as the doing away with ethnic studies, the dire situation at our Southern Border, and the killing with impunity of BIPOC people by racist factions of the police, and other White supremacist groups, xenophobia, discrimination against LGTBQIA, and Earth and Water Protector’s struggles for Mother Earth’s survival. We have always addressed issues of injustice against people considered “other” in our country and continue to be in solidarity with groups such as the Southern Border Communities Coalition, Indigenous Communities and Coalitions, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and others. We feature poetry and immigrant human rights news as well as other social and eco-justice issues facing us as citizens of the world.

Rewriting the Chicano Movement Book Celebration and Discussion

Join us for an online book launch celebration and discussion for Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken.

When: Wednesday, March 3, 2021, 5:30 p.m. Pacific Time

This online event is part of our Spring 2021 Book Series via Zoom. Event is free, but registration is required.

UPDATE: We are thrilled to announce that the following book contributors will be joining the discussion:

Holly Barnet-Sanchez is emerita associate professor of modern Latin American and Chicano/a and Latino/a art history at the University of New Mexico. The author of several publications focusing on Chicano/a murals and graphic arts, her most recent co-authored book is Give Me Life: Iconography and Identity in East L.A. Murals.

Jesús Jesse Esparza is an assistant professor of history at Texas Southern University. His area of expertise is the history of Latinos in the United States, with an emphasis on civil rights. His current book project is “Raza Schools: Latino Educational Autonomy and Activism in Texas, 1920– 1980.”

Patrick Fontes received his PhD in American history from Stanford University. His research interests include Chicano history, U.S. immigration history, twentieth-century youth subcultures, and Central California history. He teaches at Clovis Community College in Fresno, California.

Tiffany Jasmin González earned her PhD in history from Texas A&M University, College Station, and earned an accolade from the American Association of University Women for her dissertation, “Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Movement in Texas.” Tiffany holds the Bonquois Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University.

Andrea Muñoz received her BA in Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a Teach for America member and after her teaching commitment will attend graduate school.

Michael Anthony Turcios is completing his PhD in cinema and media studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. He specializes in the visual and literary culture of subaltern groups from the Global South. His dissertation is “Art of Displacement: Decolonial Visual and Literary Culture in the East Los Angeles Barrios and the Banlieues of Paris, France.”

The Chicano Movement, el movimiento, is known as the largest and most expansive civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican Americans up to that time. It made Chicanos into major American political actors and laid the foundation for today’s Latino political power. Rewriting the Chicano Movement is a collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise our understanding of the movement. These essays capture the commitment, courage, and perseverance of movement activists, both men and women, and their struggles to achieve the promises of American democracy.

To register, please go here.

Empowered! Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics

Join this online book launch and discussion celebrating Empowered! Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics with authors Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva.

When: March 24, 2021, 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

This online event is part of our Spring 2021 Book Series via Zoom. Event is free, but registration is required.

In their new book, Empowered! Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics, authors Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva argue that the state of Arizona is more inclusive and progressive then it has ever been. Following in the footsteps of grassroots organizers in California and the southeastern states, Latinos in Arizona have struggled and succeeded to alter the anti-immigrant and racist policies that have been affecting Latinos in the state for many years. Draconian immigration policies have plagued Arizona’s political history. Empowered! shows innovative ways that Latinos have fought these policies.

Please register here.