When: March 9-10, 2024
Where: The University of Arizona Campus, Tucson, AZ
Mark your calendars for the Tucson Festival of Books, a community-wide celebration of literature. As always, the festival is free to attend. Keep an eye on this page for more information about University of Arizona Press authors who will be participating in the festival, or sign up for our newsletter to get updates.
Date: Friday, October 13, 2023
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m., CDT
Where: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Latino Bookstore, 1300 Guadalupe St, San Antonio, TX
Norma Elia Cantú will present her most recent book: Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers, as part of the Texas Author Series at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies, will also speak. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be available for purchase.
About Chicana Portraits:
This innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism.
Date: Monday, September 18, 2023
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Where: ENR2 Building Room 107, University of Arizona, 1064 E Lowell St, Tucson and via Zoom
Shelby Tisdale will present her book, No Place for a Lady, at the Environmental and Natural Resources Building on the UA campus. Her presentation “Contributions of Marjorie F. Lambert to Southwest Archaeology” is free and open to the public. Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society is sponsoring the event. The hybrid event is also on Zoom.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who not only stayed and left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology but flourished. Tisdale will take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.
Shelby Tisale is the Retired Director, Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and Former Director, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Arizona.
About the book:
In No Place for a Lady, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession.
When: July 19, 2023, 6 p.m. MDT
Where: The Bleachers at New Mexico State University Art Museum, University and Solano Avenues, Las Cruces, NM
Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México will speak on a panel, “Artists and Authors on Our Nuclear Legacy,” at New Mexico State University. The panel is in conjunction with the exhibitions Cara Despain: Specter and The Branigan Cultural Center’s juried show Trinity: Legacies of Nuclear Testing. Join a panel of artists and authors who have influenced the conversation around nuclear weapons testing and production in the Southwest. Other panelists include moderator Alicia Inez Guzmán, author Joshua Wheeler, and artist Cara Despain.
In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists developed the atomic bomb. Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed from their ranches and sacred land in north-central New Mexico with inequitable or no compensation.
Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.
When: Thursday, July 20, 2023, 5:00 p.m.
Where: Navajo Nation Library, Highway 264 & Postal Loop Road, Window Rock, Arizona
Wendy Greyeyes will discuss her book A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body at the Navajo Nation Library. Greyeyes is a Diné author and assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. Books will be available for purchase and refreshments will be served.
About the book:
On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. An iron grip of colonial domination over Navajo education remains, thus inhibiting a unified path toward educational sovereignty. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.
When: July 5, 2023, 12:00 p.m. MDT
Where: online via the Museum of New Mexico
Shelby Tisdale will present her book, No Place for a Lady, in an online presentation “Marjorie F. Lambert: Museum of New Mexico’s Curator of Archaeology, 1936-1969.” The event is free and open to the public.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who not only stayed and left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology but flourished.
Shelby Tisale is the Retired Director, Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and Former Director, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe.
About the book:
In this delightful biography, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.
Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession.
When: Thursday, July 6, 2023, 6:30 p.m.
Where: José Saramago Foundation, Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, 10, Lisbon, Portugal
Juan Martinez will read from Extended Stay and other work at the José Saramago Foundation in Lisbon on July 6. He will read with José Luís Peixoto.
Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.
After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?
When: Thursday, April 27, 3 p.m.
Where: Oregon State University, Student Experience Center 354, 2251 SW Jefferson Way, Corvallis
Michelle Téllez speaks about her award-winning book Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas, as part of the Ethnic Studies Author Series. The event is free and open to the public.
Border Women tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas.
Date: February 14, 2026
Time: 10 a.m., MST
Place: Tucson Botanical Gardens, 2150 North Alvernon Way, Tucson, AZ
Carolyn Niethammer will talk about “Cactus, Corn, and Cattle: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage” at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. She will trace the big changes in diet in the Santa Cruz River Valley over the last 4,000 years. She recently received the 2025 Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Award. Niethammer is the author of A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage, which will be available for purchase and signing. The event is free with admission to the Tucson Botanical Gardens. Space is limited, so please register online.
About the book:
Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. This book offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.
Both family supper tables and the city’s trendiest restaurants feature native desert plants and innovative dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples. Award-winning writer Carolyn Niethammer deliciously shows how the Sonoran Desert’s first farmers grew tasty crops that continue to influence Tucson menus and how the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and Chinese farmers influenced what Tucsonans ate.
When: Thursday, April 27, 7 p.m.
Where: University of Arizona Poetry Center, 1508 East Helen Street, Tucson
Jennifer Elise Foerster and Michael Wasson will read poetry as part of the Distinguished Writer’s Series, curated by faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the UA. Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Maybe Bird (The Song Cave, 2022). She also wrote Leaving Tulsa and Bright Raft in the Afterweather, both published by The University of Arizona Press.
Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. Bright Raft in the Afterweather travels the spheres of the past, present, future, and eternal time, exploring the fault lines that signal the break of humanity’s consciousness from the earth.
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