Event Category: Public Lecture

Rick A. López in Amherst, MA

When: Tuesday, October 23, 2025

Time: 4:30-6:30 p.m.

Where: Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, 650 East Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA

Rick A. López celebrates his new book Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914, with a seminar at the Kinney Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. This Five College Renaissance Seminar is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase. López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College.

About the book:

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.

 

Amber McCrary in Phoenix

Date: Saturday, August 23, 2025

Time: 3-5 p.m., MST

Where: Arizona Humanities House, 1242 N Central Ave, Phoenix, AZ

Amber McCrary will read from and talk about her latest collection Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert, at the Arizona Humanities House in Phoenix. Blue Corn Tongue is the August book for the Reading Is Medicine Book Club. The event is free and open to the public.

The Reading Is Medicine Book Club recognizes that storytelling has always been a healing practice and that reading is good medicine, both individually and collectively. The Reading Is Medicine Book Club was established almost 10 years ago by Diné women, Bobbi Rose Nez and Tamara Littlesalt-Butler. The group meets bi-monthly to discuss book selections by Indigenous authors.

About the book:

In a voice that is jubilant, irreverent, sometimes scouring, sometimes heartfelt, and always unmistakably her own, Amber McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place.

Tucson Festival of Books 2026

When: March 14-15, 2026

Where: The University of Arizona Campus, Tucson, AZ, Tent #247

Mark your calendars for the Tucson Festival of Books, a community-wide celebration of literature. As always, the festival is free to attend. Check out our list of University of Arizona Press authors who will be participating in the festival and signing books at our tent, or sign up for our newsletter to get updates.

In the meantime, why not check out some highlights from last year’s festival? See photos of all the amazing authors and community members who stopped by our tent.

We look forward to seeing you at this year’s festival!

Historian Tom Sheridan in Tucson

Date: Saturday, July 12, 2025

Time: 7 p.m., MST

Where: Presidio Museum Territorial Patio, 196 N. Court Ave., Tucson, AZ

Tom Sheridan presents “Tucson, a Historically Multi-Ethnic Community” at Tucson’s Presidio Museum. The event is part of the Tucson 250+: Summer Lecture Series. The Tucson region has  been home to many cultures for the past two hundred and fifty years. Sheridan will share a brief history of the O’odham at San Xavier, the Spanish presidio and its related settlers, the Apache, and the so-called “Apaches Mansos” that were settled north of the presidio beginning in the 1790s. Tom Sheridan is author or editor of numerous books including Arizona: A History, Los Tucsonenses, and The Border and Its Bodies, co-edited with Randall H. McGuire. Tickets for this event are $10 for Tucson Presidio members, and $15 for non-members.

Tom Sheridan is a Research Anthropologist at the Southwest Center and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He directed the Mexican Heritage Project at the Arizona Historical Society from 1982-1984 and was director of the Office of Ethnohistorical Research at the Arizona State Museum from 1997 to 2003.

About Arizona: A History:

Hailed as a model state history thanks to Thomas E. Sheridan’s thoughtful analysis and lively interpretation of the people and events shaping the Grand Canyon State, Arizona: A History has become a standard in the field. For Arizona’s centennial, Sheridan revised and expanded this already top-tier state history to incorporate events and changes that have taken place in recent years. Addressing contemporary issues like land use, water rights, dramatic population increases, suburban sprawl, and the US-Mexico border, the new material makes the book more essential than ever. It successfully places the forty-eighth state’s history within the context of national and global events. No other book on Arizona history is as integrative or comprehensive.

Ann Hedlund in San Lorenzo, NM

Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Time: 6 p.m. potluck meal, 6:30 p.m. presentation

Where: Roundup Lodge, 2073 Highway 61, San Lorenzo, NM

Ann Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art (forthcoming in September 2025), will speak at the Grant County Archaeological Society meeting. Her presentation, “Artist Mac Schweitzer and Her Adventures in Southwest Archaeology,” draws from the artist’s letters, photo albums, and published reviews to tell the story of Mac’s creative and adventuresome life in the U.S. Southwest from the 1940s to the 1960s. Mac’s 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.

The event is free and open to the public. Potluck (bring your own plates & utensils, and your best dish to share) and socializing starts at 6 p.m., presentation follows at 6:30 p.m.

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.

Cynthia Radding in Virtual Arizona History Event

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.

 

Chloe Garcia Roberts Reads in Boston

Date: Thursday, May 29, 2025

Time: 6:30 p.m., EDT

Where: Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, 125 Arborway, Boston, MA

Three writers celebrate the wonderful world of plants through poetry at A Gathering of Plants and Poetry at the Arnold Arboretum. Chloe Garcia Roberts will read her prose poem, “To the Heart’s Forest She Fleeth,” about the connection between motherhood and trees. Garcia Roberts translated Homero Aridjis’s Carne de Dios: A Novel, forthcoming from The University of Press. K Prevallet will read a collection of poems on medicinal plants from her recent book A Varied and Tender Multiplicity. And Gillian Osborne will read a selection of plant-based poetry as well as essays from her book Green Green Green.

This event is free and open to the public.

About Carne de Dios:

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.

Gary Nabhan at Mission Garden

Date: Thursday, May 15, 2025

Time: 5 p.m., MST

Place: Mission Garden, 946 W Mission Ln., Tucson, AZ

Gary Nabhan invites us to ask, “Why Does the Desert Smell Like Rain: A Desert Whodunnit (with Recipes)” in this first sunset event of the summer at Mission Garden. Nabhan is desert ecologist and ethnobotanist with fifty years of fieldwork in the desert. He wrote his now classic book, The Desert Smells Like Rain at the beginning of his career. In the hot summer season, Mission Garden invites to enjoy the evening sunset glow and cooler temperatures at the garden. This free event will feature food from Oaxarico.

About the book:

Published more than forty years ago, The Desert Smells Like Rain remains a classic about nature, the Sonoran Desert and the Tohono O’odham. Gary Paul Nabhan brings O’odham voices to the page at every turn. He writes elegantly of how they husband scant water supplies, grow crops, and utilize edible wild foods. Woven through his account are coyote tales, O’odham children’s impressions of the desert, and observations of the political problems that come with living on both sides of an international border. Nabhan conveys the everyday life and extraordinary perseverance of these desert people.

Ken Lamberton Santa Cruz River Virtual Event

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.

Alan Pelaez Lopez at Pasadena City College

Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Time: 1:15 p.m.-3 p.m., PDT

Where: Creveling Lounge, Building CC, Pasadena City College, 1570 E Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA

Alan Pelaez Lopez, author of When Language Broke Open, is the keynote speaker for the “Black, Trans Migration: Lessons on Political and Community Resistance,” keynote at the 2025 Borders of Diversity Conference. Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet and installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, Mexico. By combining visual poetry, paper collage, and interactive installments, their work examines the lived experiences of undocumented migrants in the United States, the potential for vibrant Black Latin American futures, and the kinship practices that trans* and nonbinary people develop to resist and reshape power.

This event will be held in the Creveling Lounge at Pasadena City College. It is free and open to the public.

About the book:

When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.

The works collected in this anthology encompass a multitude of genres—including poetry, autobiography, short stories, diaries, visual art, and a graphic memoir—and feature the voices of established writers alongside emerging voices. Together, the contributors challenge everything we think we know about gender, sexuality, race, and what it means to experience a livable life.

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