Date: Sunday, December 1, 2024
Time: 3 p.m., PDT
Where: Art House Gallery & Cultural Center , 2905 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA
Poet Denise Low will read from her book, House of Grace, House of Blood: Poems, at The Art House Gallery & Cultural Center in Berkeley, California. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Poet Lucille Lang Day will also read from Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery.
This free in-person event is hosted by Poetry Flash. Refreshments will be provided.
About the book:
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, 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.
Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Time: 6:30 p.m., MST
Where: Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ
Lisa Schnebly Heidinger and Julie Morrison will share tales from Arizona’s highways and bi-ways that inspired their new book Arizona Friend Trips: Stories from the Road, at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix. Heidinger was a television, newspaper, and magazine reporter covering all areas of the state; and she’s authored twelve books focused on Arizona. Morrison is the author of Barbed: A Memoir as well as poems, short stories, and essays.
About the book:
Arizona Friend Trips is a celebration of friendship, discovery, and the enduring spirit of exploration. As Lisa and Julie share their favorite trips and formative experiences, readers are treated to an intimate glimpse into their lives, making this book a joyous and uplifting read for travelers and armchair explorers alike. Whether you’re planning your own Arizona adventure or simply yearning to wander from the comfort of home, Arizona Friend Trips promises to inspire, delight, and leave you longing for the open road.
Date: Thursday, November 14, 2024
Time: 6:30 p.m., EST
Where: Amherst Books, 8 Main Street, Amherst, MA
Manuela Lavinas Picq will launch her book, Savages and Citizens, that she co-authored with Andrew Canessa. This celebration and book signing is free and open to the public at Amherst Books. There will be music, wine and cheese. Manuela Lavinas Picq is a senior lecturer in political science at Amherst College and a Latin American public intellectual whose work at the intersection of scholarship, journalism, and activism focuses on Indigenous politics.
About the book:
Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, the book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.
Date: Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Time: 6 p.m., CDT
Where: Sam Houston State University, Austin Hall, 1741 University Ave., Huntsville, TX
Alma García will be reading from her debut novel All That Rises, at Sam Houston State University. She will also be available to sign books. The reading is presented by the University’s MFA in Writing, Editing, and Publishing. García’s award-winning short fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and most recently in phoebe and the anthology Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. She is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. This in-person event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
All That Rises is a story of families and conflict in El Paso, Texas. In this novel, mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.
Date: Sunday, November 24, 2024
Time: 1 p.m., CDT
Where: Center for Native Futures, 56 W Adams St, Chicago, IL
Kimberly Blaeser, will read from her book, Ancient Light, for the at the Center for Native Futures in Chicago. Joining in the reading are Elise Pachen and Kenzie Allen. Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member. This in-person event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
When: Thursday, November 7, 2024
Time: 10 a.m., MST
Where: Garden Pavilion, Tohono Chul, 7366 N Paseo Del Norte, Tucson
Author Theodore H. Fleming will speak about his book, Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants at Tohono Chul in Tucson. His presentation will include his beautiful photographs of birds, bats and the flowers that they pollinate. Fleming spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He now lives in Tucson and is a volunteer at Tohono Chul. His new book will be available for purchase and the author will sign books.
About the book:
Like gems flitting through the sky, hummingbirds attract our eye. But they are more than flash: they are critical pollinators in their ecosystems. Similarly in the darkness of night, nectar-feeding bats perform the same important ecological service as their colorful avian counterparts.
A deeply thoughtful and researched dive into evolutionary history, Birds, Bats, and Blooms offers an engaging trip across evolutionary trajectories as it discusses nectar-feeding birds and bats and their coevolution as pollinators with flowering plants. The primary focus is on New World birds such as hummingbirds and their chiropteran counterparts (nectar-feeding bats in the family Phyllostomidae). It also discusses their Old World ecological counterparts, including sunbirds, honeyeaters, lorikeets, and nectar-feeding bats in the Pteropodidae family. Fleming also addresses the conservation status of these beautiful animals.
When: Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Time: 12 p.m., MST
Where: 12880 N Vistoso Village Dr, Oro Valley, AZ
Author Theodore H. Fleming will speak about his book, Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants at the Western National Parks Association store in Oro Valley. His presentation will include his beautiful photographs of birds, bats and the flowers that they pollinate. His new book will be available for purchase and the author will sign books. This event is free, but requires registration here.
About the book:
Like gems flitting through the sky, hummingbirds attract our eye. But they are more than flash: they are critical pollinators in their ecosystems. Similarly in the darkness of night, nectar-feeding bats perform the same important ecological service as their colorful avian counterparts.
A deeply thoughtful and researched dive into evolutionary history, Birds, Bats, and Blooms offers an engaging trip across evolutionary trajectories as it discusses nectar-feeding birds and bats and their coevolution as pollinators with flowering plants. The primary focus is on New World birds such as hummingbirds and their chiropteran counterparts (nectar-feeding bats in the family Phyllostomidae). It also discusses their Old World ecological counterparts, including sunbirds, honeyeaters, lorikeets, and nectar-feeding bats in the Pteropodidae family. Fleming also addresses the conservation status of these beautiful animals.
Date: Saturday, November 16, 2024
Time: 1:15 p.m., CST
Where: Texas Tent, Texas Book Festival, Austin, TX
Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, is a featured author at this year’s Texas Book Festival. He will speak on “Texas Roots, Hidden Truths: Uncovering Family Histories and Lost Legacies” with author Jessica Goudeau. A book signing at 2:15 p.m. will follow the talk. The free festival takes place in downtown Austin, along 11th Street and Congress Avenue, on November 16 and 17. Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. He is an associate professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing program.
About the book:
A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together.
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.
When: Monday, October 28, 2024
Time: 5:30-7 p.m., MDT
Where: Avogadro’s Number, 605 S. Mason St., Fort Collins, CO
Stephen E. Strom will be part of a panel discussion featuring his book, Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation at Avogadro’s Number in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hosted by the Warner College of Natural Resources, this discussion will highlight the theme of collaborative conservation. This in-person 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: Thursday, October 24, 2024
Time: 6 – 8 p.m.
Where: 18th St. Casa de Cultura, 2057 W. 18th St., Chicago, IL
Tim Z. Hernandez will read and sign his book, They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir, at 18th St. Casa de Cultura in Chicago. In this highly anticipated memoir, Hernandez takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. The event is free and open to the public; the book will be available for purchase, and the author will sign books.
About the book:
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.
They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.
The University of Arizona Press
