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!
When: November 6-7, 2025
Where: Tucson, AZ
Join us in Tucson for the 2025 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference & Bookfair. The conference runs November 5-8, and the University of Arizona Press will be at the bookfair November 6-7.
Learn more about the conference at the ALTA Website.
About ALTA:
“ALTA has been centered on the art, craft, and culture of literary translation for over four decades. Over the years, ALTA has grown in size and scope with an eye toward inclusivity and an aim to embrace and reflect the field. From its committees to its board, staff, and beyond, ALTA’s work is responsive to and shaped by literary translators and their communities.”
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2025
Time: 6:30 p.m., PDT
Where: Namaste Lounge, UC Santa Cruz, College Nine Rd., Santa Cruz, CA
Rafael A. Martínez will read and speak about his book, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, in the Namaste Lounge at UC Santa Cruz. Joining Martínez in conversation is Yosimar Reyes; the event is presented by CRES70U and I.D.E.A.S. from UC Santa Cruz. Martínez is an assistant professor in the Southwest Borderlands Initiative at Arizona State University whose work focuses on immigrant rights, mixed-status families, and Latinx cultural and historical productions in the Southwest borderlands.
This event is free and open to the public. The first 25 students will receive a free book.
About the book:
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2025
Time: 7 p.m., MDT
Where: Bears Ears Education Center 567 W Main St, Hwy 191, Bluff, UT
Photographer and writer Stephen Strom will show slides from the book he co-authored with Jonathan Bailey, The Greater San Rafael Swell, at The Bears Ears Education Center in Bluff, Utah. He will also talk about his new book, Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation. This event is free and open to the public. The event is hosted by the Bears Ears Partnership.
About the books:
Natural and human history come together in The Greater San Rafael Swell, which spans much of Emery County in Utah. Authors Stephen Strom and Jonathan Bailey paint a multi-faceted picture of a singular place through photographs, along with descriptions of geology, paleontology, archaeology, history, and dozens of interviews with individuals who devoted more than two decades to developing a shared vision of the future of both the Swell and the County. At its core, the book relates the important story of how a coalition of ranchers, miners, off-road enthusiasts, conservationists, recreationists, and Native American tribal nations worked together for nearly 25 years to forge and pass the Emery County Public Lands Management Act in 2019.
Forging a Sustainable Southwest introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs. Through the voices of more than seventy individuals involved in these efforts, we learn how they’ve developed plans for protecting, restoring, and stewarding lands sustainably; the management and funding tools they’ve used; and their perceptions of the challenges that remain and how to meet them.
Date: Saturday, April 5, 2025
Time: 4 – 5 p.m., EDT
Where: Third Room, 46 Wall Street, Asheville, NC
Join Tim Z. Hernandez at the Connect Beyond Festival where he will read and speak about his book, They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir. The Connect Beyond Festival celebrates art and culture through a weekend of panels, film screenings and workshops that explore the intersection of art, film and storytelling. After the reading, Hernandez will engage attendees in a fireside chat and writing exercise.
This event is open to the public with tickets ranging from $0-$50. Visit the website for more information.
About the book:
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.
Date: Friday, April 11, 2025
Time: 6-8 p.m., MDT
Where: The Rochester Hotel Garden, 726 E 2nd Avenue, Durango, CO
Stephen Strom, author of Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation, will read from his book and sign his book at The Rochester Hotel Garden presented by Maria’s Literary Foundation. This book details efforts to craft the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, establish Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, protect Cienega Ranch, and create the Malpai Borderlands Group. It will appeal to anyone interested in grassroots efforts to protect the vital ecosystems of the western United States.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
Forging a Sustainable Southwest introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs. Through the voices of more than seventy individuals involved in these efforts, we learn how they’ve developed plans for protecting, restoring, and stewarding lands sustainably; the management and funding tools they’ve used; and their perceptions of the challenges that remain and how to meet them.
Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Time: 7 -9 p.m., MST
Where: The King’s English Bookshop, 1511 South 1500 East, Salt Lake City, UT
Join Stephen Strom in an engaging discussion of his book, Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation, at The King’s English Bookshop. This book details efforts to craft the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, establish Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, protect Cienega Ranch, and create the Malpai Borderlands Group. It will appeal to anyone interested in grassroots efforts to protect the vital ecosystems of the western United States. Copies the book will be available to purchase.
This event is open to the public. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased here.
About the book:
Forging a Sustainable Southwest introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs. Through the voices of more than seventy individuals involved in these efforts, we learn how they’ve developed plans for protecting, restoring, and stewarding lands sustainably; the management and funding tools they’ve used; and their perceptions of the challenges that remain and how to meet them.
Date: Monday, March 3, 2025
Time: 7 p.m., CST
Where: Delaware Street Commons, 1220 Delaware St., Lawrence, KS
Poet Denise Low will read from her book, House of Grace, House of Blood, at Delaware St. Commons on March 3. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. Low has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage.
About the book:
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, poet Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations.
In a personal poetic treatment of documents, oral tradition, and images, the author embodies the contradictions she unravels. From a haunting first-person perspective, Low’s formally inventive archival poetry combines prose and lyric, interweaving verse with historical voices in a dialogue with the source material. Each poem builds into a larger narrative on American genocide, the ways in which human loss corresponds to ecological destruction, and how intimate knowledge of the past can enact healing.
Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Time: 7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., CST
Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City
Meena Khandelwal will talk about her new book, Cookstove Chronicles : Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India, at the Book Matters event at Prairie Lights Books. Elana Buch, associate professor of anthropology, will join anthropologists Brady G’sell and Khandelwal for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Light refreshments will follow. This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here.
About the book:
Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.
Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Time: 5 p.m.- 6:30 p.m., CST
Where: Pebble Hill, 101 S Debardeleben St., Auburn, AL
Author Ezekiel Stear will give a book talk to celebrate the release of Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion and Futurities in Colonial Mexico, at Pebble Hill in Auburn, Alabama. Stear is an assistant professor of Spanish and colonial Spanish American literature at Auburn University. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the Auburn University website here.
About the book:
Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahuas conceptualized their futures in the early colonial period. Scholar Ezekiel G. Stear delves deeply into canonical texts such as the Florentine Codex and the Crónica mexicayotl as well as understudied texts such as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, the Tira de Tepechpan, and the Anales de Juan Bautista. The study does more than describe how Nahuas conceived of their own futures: it also shows their specific plans for moving into the coming years.
The University of Arizona Press
