Event Category: Public Lecture

Pablo Zavala Online with the Mexican Studies Research Collective

Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Time: 3-4 p.m., CDT

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.

Pablo Zavala at the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans

Date: Friday, April 10, 2026

Time: 6 p.m., CDT

Place: Mexican Cultural Institute at the Mexican Consulate, 901 Convention Center Blvd., New Orleans, LA

Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968, will speak about his book at the Mexican Cultural Institute located at the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans on Friday, April 10. 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.

About the book:

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

Kimberly Blaeser at National Book Foundation Event in Madison, WI

Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026

Time: 7 p.m., CDT

Place: Madison Public Library – Central, 201 West Mifflin Street, Madison, WI

Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light, a National Book Foundation Science + Literature selected title, will read at the Madison Public Library. Blaeser collects poems that trace the many crises Indigenous communities navigate—from centuries of violence to the COVID-19 pandemic—alongside the ancestral knowledge that allows for a reclamation of language, of land, and of healing. Blaeser is a former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets. Blaeser will join Sean Hill at the National Book Foundation’s event, “Science + Literature: The Science of Hope.” This event is free and open to the public, and registration can be found here.

About the book:

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.

Pablo Zavala at Loyola University in New Orleans

Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Time: 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m. CDT

Place: Nunemaker Auditorium, Loyola University, 6363 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans, LA

Pablo Zavala author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968, will speak about his book as part of the Design Forum series at Loyola University. 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 completed his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. 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.

About the book:

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

Homero Aridjis and Chloe Garcia Roberts at Topos Too in New York

Date: Sunday, March 8, 2026

Time: 6 p.m., EDT

Where: Topos Too Bookstore, 59-22 Myrtle Ave, New York, NY

Topos Too Bookstore hosts the New York book launch for Carne de Dios: A Novel with author Homero Aridjis’s and translator Chloe Garcia Roberts. They will be in conversation with Mike Soto. Through Aridjis’s lyrical prose, vividly translated by Garcia Roberts, we first journey to the mountains of Huautla de Jiménez in 1957, where María Sabina’s veladas—mushroom rituals—draw seekers from across the world forever altering the course of Sabina’s life and the world’s perception of Mexico’s Indigenous traditions. Aridjis was born in Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico. He has written fifty-one books of poetry and prose and has won many important literary prizes including the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Formerly Mexico’s ambassador to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and UNESCO, he is also the president emeritus of PEN International. Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese; and she is deputy editor of the Harvard Review and a lecturer of poetry at MIT.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the book:

In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived.

María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home—her Holy Children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of God. But her life changes forever when an amateur mycologist from New York, with a cameraman in tow, visits her to experience for himself the mushroom ceremony, or velada, he knows only from whispers in anthropological records. When he publishes an unauthorized article about his experience in LIFE Magazine 1957, the stage is set for an explosive encounter between the burgeoning international counterculture and the woman who became an unwilling icon of the psychedelic revolution.

Patricia Gilman and Mary Whisenhunt at Amerind Virtual Talk

Date: Thursday, March 12, 2026

Time: 12 p.m., MST

Where: online, register here

Patricia A. Gilman and Mary E. Whisenhunt, authors of Mimbres Far from the Heartland, will give an Amerind online talk, “Life on the Edge of the Mimbres Region: Powers Ranch as a Mimbres Site.” Registration can be found here. The talk will discuss what it means to be Mimbres at the Powers Ranch site, a small settlement at the western edge of the Mimbres region. When people think of Mimbres archaeology, they picture beautiful black-on-white pottery with paintings of people and animals and large pueblo sites in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico. However, there were Mimbres sites beyond the Mimbres Valley, but they were different from those in the valley.

Patricia Gilman has done archaeological research in the Mimbres region for more than 50 years, retiring from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. One of her research foci has been Mimbres beyond the Mimbres Valley. Mary Whisenhunt received her anthropology doctorate in 2020, conducting her field work in southeast Arizona. Her research focused on the social resilience of precontact Indigenous people on the western boundary of the Mimbres region.

About the book:

This new work offers a unique investigation into the complexities of Mimbres identity and social dynamics beyond the traditional Mimbres Valley heartland. Situated at the western edge of the Mimbres region, the Powers Ranch site represents the only professionally excavated Classic period settlement in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. Through excavation and analysis of architecture and a rich array of artifacts, including ceramic sherds, projectile points, and shell artifacts, the authors provide a detailed look at the lives of Mimbres people on the periphery.

This work compares findings from Powers Ranch with those from neighboring sites in the Gila River Valley and further east in the Mimbres Valley, unraveling patterns of identity and affiliation that challenge previous understandings.

Manuel Iris Book Launch at Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, OH

Date: Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Time: 6 p.m., EST

Place: Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut Street #1100, Cincinnati, OH

Tickets: Free, registration is required

Manuel Iris will celebrate the publication of The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos at his book launch party at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati. He will read from this poetry collection and be joined in conversation with Cincinnati Poet Laureate, Dick Hague, and poet and professor Felicia Zamora. The Spanish and English poetry collection is the Winner of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio, writer-in-residence at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, and writer-in-residence at Thomas More University.

The event is free and open to the public, and registration is required.

About the book:

This award-winning bilingual collection intertwines the lives of a Renaissance painter and a modern migrant worker, offering a fresh perspective on art and migration.

In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents.

By comparing and at times intertwining these two poetic narratives, the book explores themes of art, migration, narco-violence, family, spirituality, and the idea that every human being represents all humanity at any moment in history. Both Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Domínguez become relatable and intimate figures, part of our own story.

Written in simple, sharp language, the book employs surprising imagery and a novel structure to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, while examining the intricacies of the human condition—from the life of Saint Anthony to the violent acts of narcos across Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border. With formal sophistication and philosophical depth, this work enriches the tradition of poetry about both migration and art, contributing to the literary heritage of Mexico and the United States over the past several decades.

Ann Hedlund at Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, AZ

Date: Saturday, January 31, 2026

Time: 10 a.m., MST

Where: Amerind Foundation, 2100 N Amerind Road, Dragoon, AZ

Ann Lane Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art, will give an illustrated talk at the Amerind Foundation. Her talk is titled: “Mac Schweitzer: Rediscovering a Southwest Artist and Her Legacy.” The event is part of Friends of Western Art-Amerind Exhibit Celebration. Gallery exhibit doors open at 9 a.m. for viewing; the featured artworks, exemplifying the power, beauty, need and gift of rain in the West, are from the private collections of FWA members and Amerind’s permanent collection. 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. Tickets for the event are free and can be reserved here.

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.

“A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back” Art Reception at U of A in Tucson

Date: Thursday, February 12, 2026

Time: 4-7 p.m., MST

Place: Joseph Gross Gallery, University of Arizona School of Art, 1031 N. Olive Road, Tucson, AZ

The University of Arizona School of Art celebrates A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back with an exhibition of artworks drawn from and created in response to the 2022 anthology. The exhibition runs from January 13 to February 20, 2026. A reception and a Q&A panel with the artists and curators will be held Thursday, February 12, 2026. The book will be available for purchase during the reception. In the nearby Lionel Rombach Gallery, there will be a selection of solo and group shows including undergraduate, graduate and cross-campus collaborators.

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a touchstone work for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j wilson, Joni Boyd Acuff, and Amelia M Kraehe offered new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

About the book:

In A Love Letter, creators illuminate, question, and respond to current politics, progressive struggles, transformations, acts of resistance, and solidarity, while also offering readers a space for renewal and healing. The central theme of the original Bridge is honored, exposing the lived realities of women of color at the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, advancing those early conversations on what it means to be Third World feminist conscious.

A Love Letter recognizes the challenges faced by women of color in a twenty-first-century world of climate and economic crises, increasing gun violence, and ever-changing social media constructs for women of color. It also retains the clarion call Bridge set in motion, as Moraga wrote: “A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longing—all fuse to create a politic born of necessity.”

Tim Z. Hernandez at Reedley College in Reedley, CA

Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026

Time: 7 p.m., PST

Where: McClarty Center for Fine & Performing Arts, 995 N Reed Ave, Reedley College, Reedley, CA

Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, will speak at Reedley College on April 16. The event is free and open to the public. They Call You Back is the featured book for the 2025-2026 1Book/1College program. In 2016, the Reedley College Literary Arts adopted the 1Book/1College program, hoping to create a college- and community-wide conversation around a single work in the belief that a shared experience leads to deeper and more meaningful engagement and connection.

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.

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.

The University of Arizona Press