The University of Arizona Press
Thursday, March 28 – Our friends at the the Wexner Center for the Arts will host the book release event for Paloma Martinez-Cruz’s much-anticipated contribution to our Latinx Pop Culture Series Food Fight!: Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace. The Wexnar Center is Ohio State University’s multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art and is the perfect host for the event, as Food Fight! contributes to urgent discussions around the problems of cultural misappropriation, labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining establishments. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary.
Event Category: Reading & Signing
Marquis Bey at the Free Library of Philadelphia
Monday, February 25, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. – Marquis Bay will discuss his new book Them Goon Rules, which reads like a critical memoir and queries the function and implications of politicizing Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Them Goon Rules binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York-based Audre Lorde project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism.
Marquis Bey at Politics and Prose Bookstore at Union Market
Saturday, February 23, 2019 at 1 p.m. – Marquis Bey will read from his debut collection Them Goon Rules at Union Market’s Politics and Prose Bookstore. A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Paul Robeson House & Museum.
Casandra López at the UC Riverside Writers Week Conference 2019
Friday, February 15, 2019 at 11:00 a.m. – Tom Lutz and the UC Riverside host Casandra López for the 42nd Annual Writers Week Conference 2019. Writers Week is the longest-running, free literary event in California and features the most renowned authors of our day alongside those at the start of promising careers.
Speaking to both a personal and collective loss, in her debut collection Brother Bullet Casandra López confronts her relationships with violence, grief, trauma, guilt, and, ultimately, survival. Revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder, López traces the course of the bullet—its trajectory, impact, wreckage—in poems that are paralyzing and raw with emotion, yet tender and alive in revelations of light.
Marquis Bey at the Penn Book Center
Tuesday, February 19, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. – The Penn Book Center hosts Marques Bey in Conversation with Destiny Crocket for the book release event of Bey’s debut collection Them Goon Rules. A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Paul Robeson House & Museum.
Urayoán Noel Featured in Hopscotch Translation Series
Thursday, January 31, 2019 – The Penn Book Center’s Hopscotch Translation Series hosts Urayoán Noel for a reading and discussion of Buzzing Hemisphere along with Raquel Salas Rivera. In this expansive collection, we hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and São Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel’s bilingual poems experiment with eccentric self-translation, often blurring the line between original and translation as a way to question language hierarchies and allow for translingual experiences.
Reflections About Bears Ears: An Evening in Honor of Karen Strom
Wednesday, January 23 at 7:00 p.m.— Following a program about the Bears Ears region, Stephen Strom will be signing copies of his new books, Voices from Bears Ears and Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land at the Center for English as a Second Language (1013 E University Blvd) on the University of Arizona campus. This program honors a recent gift of Native American art from Stephen Strom, in memory of his late wife, Karen. Dr. Strom will speak about his latest project documenting the southern Utah region known as Bears Ears. Keynote speaker, Carleton Bowekaty, a member of the Pueblo of Zuni Tribal Council and the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, will share experiences of the coalition as it advocated for the establishment of Bears Ears National Monument in 2015/16, and how it is responding to the monument’s subsequent downsizing in 2017.
A reception will follow the program, during which selections from the Strom Collection will be on display, and Dr. Strom will sign copies of his books. This program is free, and it will be located in room 103 of the Center of English as a Second Language (CESL). CESL is one building east of the Arizona State Museum North. Garage parking is available at Euclid Ave and Second St or Tyndall Ave and Fourth St. For more information, visit the Arizona State Museum website.
Laura Da’ book release at Elliott Bay Book Company
Thursday, November 1 at 7:00 p.m. – Please join our friends at Elliott Bay Book Company for a reading to celebrate Laura Da’s new book, Instruments of the True Measure. Laura will be joined by poets Sasha LaPointe and Casandra López.
Instruments of the True Measure charts the coordinates and intersections of land, history, and culture. Lyrical passages map the parallel lives of ancestral figures and connect dispossessions of the past to lived experiences of the present. Shawnee history informs the collection, and Da’s fascination with uncovering and recovering brings the reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland. Images of forced removal and frontier violence reveal the wrenching loss and reconfiguration of the Shawnee as a people. The body and history become lands that are measured and plotted with precise instruments.
About the poets:
Laura Da’ is a poet and public school teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She is a recipient of the Native American Arts and Cultures Fellowship and an Artist Trust Fellowship. Her first book, Tributaries, won the 2016 American Book Award.
Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as from her life in the city of Seattle. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Coast Salish language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. Her work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus Literary Journal, Indian Country Today, Luna Luna Magazine, The Yellow Medicine Review, The Portland Review, AS/Us Journal, THE Magazine, and Aborted Society Online Zine. She recently graduated with an MFA through The Institute of American Indian Arts with a focus on creative nonfiction and poetry.
Casandra López is a Chicana and California Indian (Cahuilla/Tongva/ Luiseño) writer who’s received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf and Jackstraw. She’s been selected for residencies with the School of Advanced Research and Hedgebrook. Her chapbook, Where Bullet Breaks was published by the Sequoyah National Research Center and her poetry collection, Brother Bullet, is forthcoming from University of Arizona. She’s a founding editor of As Us and teaches at Northwest Indian College.
Jennifer Foerster at Druskininkai Poetic Fall Festival
Saturday, October 6 at 7:00 p.m. – As part of the Druskininkai Poetic Fall, Jennifer Foerster will read in the final poetry evening alongside Kornelijus Platelis (Lithuania), Sigitas Parulskis (Lithuania), and Sophia Walker (UK). The Druskininkai Poetic Fall is an international annual literary festival, organized in Druskininkai and Vilnius in the first half of October. It is a laboratory festival, aimed primarily at poets, critics, literary scholars and publishers, that also kindly invites the public. The main goal of the festival is to bring together the community of poets, give them conditions for sharing their works, reflect on and evaluate their texts, and identify the changes in the current trends.
Jennifer Foerster at Litquake 2018 Festival
Monday, October 15 at 6:00 p.m. – Litquake!, San Francisco’s Literary Festival, presents “New Native Voices: A Place of Many Nations.” In this discussion of contemporary Native American literature, panelists will dive into the rich diversity of Native writing today, and how writing itself can be a homeland. Featuring Heid E. Erdrich (New Poets of Native Nations), Jennifer Foerster (Bright Raft in the Afterweather), and Greg Sarris (How a Mountain Was Made), Tribal Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.