Friday, September 14 at 6:30 p.m. – Join us for a special opening night screening of Bisbee ’17 at the Loft Cinema, featuring a post-film Q&A with director Robert Greene, in conversation with our own UA Press Bisbee ’17 author, Robert Houston! Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing at this event.
About the film:
It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die
Townspeople confront this shocking, controversial past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating miners’ strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary. In Bisbee ’17, filmmaker Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine) bends the boundaries of documentary and confronts the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle, creating a unique, thought-provoking film that stirs up the ghosts of our past as a cautionary tale that speaks to our present. (Dir. by Robert Greene, 2018, USA, 124 mins., Not Rated)
“Audacious and timely … a bracing documentary … confirms that director Robert Greene is one of America’s finest new voices in non-fiction.” – Nick Schager, Variety
Saturday, May 19 at 1:00 p.m. – Ecotechnics is an applied science that deals with improving the relationship between humans and our technologies and the biospheres. . It seeks to fulfill human needs based on a deep understanding of natural ecosystems, and minimizing disruption to those ecosystems. Join Dr. Mark Nelson in a lecture at Santa Fe Botanical Garden covering varying topics regarding ecotechnics such as; arid land organic farming, ecological approaches to watershed treatment, gray water irrigation, and air purification using plants and soils. He will also draw on his personal experience of living with a mini biosphere for two years in Biosphere 2 and the insights that ambitious experiment teaches for changing the way we think about and live within our planetary biosphere.
Saturday, April 7 at 3:00 p.m. – Albuquerque’s Bookworks hosts Tim Z. Hernandez for a reading and signing of his documentary novel All They Will Call You. Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, Hernandez will reconstruct the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including at least twenty-eight Mexican citizens–farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Pushing narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, Hernandez’s All They Will Call You renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.
Friday, April 13 at 7:00 p.m. – Counterpath Press hosts poet Jennifer Elise Foerster for a reading of her second full-length collection Bright Raft in the Afterweather. In this dazzling new collection, Foerster confronts humanity’s dangerous ecological imbalance, immersing the reader in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. Each poem blends Foerster’s refined use of language with a mythic and environmental lyricism as she explores themes of destruction, spirituality, loss, and remembrance.
Friday, April 6 at 7:00 p.m. – Our friends at Antigone Books host University of Arizona professor and acclaimed poet Farid Matuk for a celebration and reading from his second full-length collection of poems The Real Horse, a sustained address to the poet’s daughter that considers her position as a natural-born female citizen of the “First World” in juxtaposition with the poet’s experience as a once-undocumented immigrant of mixed ethnicity whose paternity is unavoidably implicated in patriarchy. Taking its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, The Real Horse invites readers into a shared practice of thinking and feeling that interrogates the confounding intersections of gender, race, class, and national status not as abstract concepts but as foundational intimacies.
Saturday, April 7 at 12 p.m. and 2 p.m – Mark Nelson, one of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, will offer a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world in a two separate talks at Biosphere 2. In each lecture, Nelson will clear up common misconceptions about the 1991–1993 closure experiment and discuss the project’s implications for today’s global environmental challenges. Copies of his book Pushing Our Limit: Insights from Biosphere 2 will be available for purchase and signing.
Thursday, October 12 at 7:00 p.m. – Our friends at the UA Poetry Center present Martín Espada and Odilia Galván Rodríguez, who will read from their work. After the reading, there will be a panel, moderated by Mari Herreras, and a book signing. This event will be held at the Center for Creative Photography.
The University of Arizona Press
