Festival to Feature Science, Society, New Works
The annual Tucson Festival of Books will present authors and events around the culinary arts, children's and teen literature, science, health and medicine, crime, sports, travel, science fiction, self-help, the arts and other genres.

University Relations - Communications
March 2, 2016

13443_1488f04b5c8d2f6.jpg

(Photo: Patrick McArdle/UANews)


This year's Tucson Festival of Books will include authors and events representing self-publishing, poetry, the STEM fields, children's literature, screenwriting, romance, environment and nature, race, and politics.

The festival, to be held on the University of Arizona campus March 12 and 13, celebrates — and also raises money for — literacy programs across southern Arizona. The UA has been a major sponsor of the festival, and the official host site, since its debut in 2009. Since then, the festival has generated more than $1.2 million in donations toward efforts to improve literacy rates in southern Arizona.

This year's special events include the "National Parks Experience," coinciding with the 100-year anniversary of the federal agency; multiple events in honor of Shakespeare's First Folio at the UA; and "Bringing Edgar Allan Poe to Life," which is part of the festival's participation in "Big Read Connects Tucson" with Literacy Connects, via a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Other highlights will be:

The Science of Things 

Scientific exploration is a mainstay each year, with dozens of events devoted to science, technology, engineering, and math exploration and literacy.

One of the main attractions is Science City, the largest science event held in the state, with five diverse science neighborhoods, hands-on activities, conversations with science authors and researchers, laboratory tours, science presentations and other events. In fact, one of more than 150 science-related participants will be the UA's OSIRIS-REx team, which is preparing for the Sept. 8 launch of the asteroid sample return mission. 

On both festival days, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum will host a live animal show at 10 a.m. at the Science Stage.

Open houses and tours include those at Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium, the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, the UA Libraries, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab and the UA Insect Collection, among others.

More information about Science City is available online. Science City is run by the BIO5 Institute and College of Science in association with College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Race and Gender in America

Multiple events will address the topic of race and gender across the nation.

"Race in America: Changing Cultural Landscapes" will be held March 13 at 2:30 p.m. in the UA BookStore tent on the UA Mall. Samara Klar, an assistant professor in the UA's School of Government and Public Policy, will moderate the discussion. Scheduled as panelists are:

  • Nationally syndicated multi-award-winning Chicano cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz
  • Linda Martín Alcoff, a philosophy professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, whose most recent work is "The Future of Whiteness"
  • Cornell University historian Edward E. Baptist, author of "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism"
  • Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, the William P. Reynolds Professor of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, who is the author of "Our America" and recently "A Foot in the River"

Also, "Powerful Women in Washington" will be held March 12 at 1 p.m. in the UA Gallagher Theater, with authors discussing the contributions of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and first lady Michelle Obama. Reservations are required and may be made online starting March 3. Lawyer and social advocate Linda Hirshman and Peter Slevin, a veteran national and international correspondent who spent a dozen years at The Washington Post, will speak during the event.

On March 12 at 4 p.m., Jonathan Kozol, a crusader for a balanced public school education, will present "The Influence of Testing and Accountability on Curriculum: A Feast of Riches" in the College of Education's Kiva Auditorium. During the civil rights movement, Kozol moved into a poor, African-American neighborhood in Boston to become an elementary school teacher, and he has since devoted his life's work to improving equal opportunity to public school children. Reservations are required and may be made online starting March 3.

Several events will be held in the "Nuestras Raices" category, highlighting Latino authors, poets and activists. Those include "The Politics of Poetry: Social Activism With a Fine Point Pen," detailing the experience of nine students who chained themselves to the doors of the Arizona State Capitol in protest of SB 1070. With Tucson poets Enrique García Naranjo and Mari Herreras, managing editor of Tucson Weekly, writer and poet Odilia Galván Rodríguez will pay tribute to the late Francisco X. Alarcón and examine the literary explosion that is "Poetry of Resistance."

Understanding Our Sociopolitical Selves

The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, a festival sponsor, is introducing a new tent this year and will host discussions, readings and activities highlighting the work of departments and programs within the college.

At tent No. 162, the college's activities include a March 12 discussion at 10 a.m., "Difference and Inequality in American Capitalism," featuring gender and women's studies professor Adam Geary and sociology professor Corey Abramson, moderated by John Nichols of The Nation magazine.

The discussion will be followed by an 11:30 talk, "The Perils of Women on the Border," featuring English professor Cristina Ramirez and local journalists Kathyn Ferguson and Margaret Regan.

"The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences is pleased to help the festival achieve its goals for childhood literacy in our community and is excited to showcase the exemplary work of our faculty and students," said Lydia Bruenig, director of outreach and special projects for the college, which maintains a site for all of its events.

"This is the single best opportunity for friends and alumni to engage faculty and students through conversation and hands-on activities and to experience the diversity of new ideas inspiring their scholarship," Bruenig said.

Spotlight on the LGBT Community

"The Changing Face of LGBTQ Literature" discussion will be held March 12 at 1 p.m. in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences tent on the UA Mall with Jos Charles, the founding editor of THEM, a trans literary journal; Kazim Ali, a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator; and Fenton Johnson, a LAMDA-award-winning author and professor of creative writing. 

Also, the National Institute on Civil Discourse has provided support for Linda Hirshman, also author of "Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution," to attend the festival.

Hirshman will join Geary and Charles, also a UA graduate student, in "LGBTQ Politics," a conversation about the changing ways politics influences those who identify on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer spectrum. The talk will be held March 12 from 4-5 p.m. in the Kachina Lounge in the Student Union Memorial Center.

Authors Share New Books

Several books will make their debut during the festival, including:

  • "Clawback" by UA alumnae J. A. Jance, which follows the murder of a man whose Ponzi scheme bankrupted hundreds of people, and left them seeking justice or revenge
  • Lisa Lutz's "The Passenger," a crime novel that follows a woman who creates and sheds new identities as she travels cross country to escape after having left her husband's body at the base of the stairs
  • "Somewhere Out There" by Amy Hatvany, which follows the lives of two sisters abandoned by their mother as they work to reunite with her decades later
  • "People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy” by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, exploring a world in a post-technology era
  • Chris Pavone's "The Travelers," which details the story of a travel writer who ultimately becomes a spy

Another is "The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide," an anthology organized and co-edited by Christopher Cokinos, director of the creative writing program in the Department of English, and Eric Magrane, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Development.

The UA Press recently published the guide, an innovative anthology that blends poetry, prose and natural history to connect different ways of thinking about ecology in the Sonoran Desert. During the festival, both will speak about the guide March 12, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the festival's main stage, and again with others from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in the Kiva Room of the Student Union.

The guide provides "the information you would find in traditional field guides — the names of desert organisms, what kind of habitat they use, their life histories and descriptions of what they look like," while also serving as an anthology of contemporary writing about the Sonoran Desert, Cokinos said.

The guide includes five sections — plants, invertebrates, birds, mammals, and reptiles and amphibians — introducing readers to the common and iconic organisms of the Sonoran Desert. Each organism is illustrated by artist Paul Mirocha. While Magrane and Cokinos provided all of the natural history descriptions, more than 50 writers contributed poetry and essays that accompany the descriptions.

"By bringing together poetry with natural history, our hope is to inspire care for this place in those who pick it up and read it, whether they're throwing it into a backpack to take out on the trail or reading it at home in their favorite reading chair," Magrane said. "It's about community, as well, in the broadest sense of other creatures and species, as well as the fabulous community of poets and writers here in Tucson."

Extra info

What

Tucson Festival of Books

Where

UA Mall

When

Saturday and Sunday, March 12 and 13

For more information about the Tucson Festival of Books: http://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org

Also, the UA's Parking and Transportation Services is piloting a partnership with Metropia, a traffic mitigation app that predicts traffic behavior so a user can see how long their route may take when departing at different times.

With 130,000 people anticipated to be on campus, Metropia’s free mobile app will display available parking locations to the user.

Metropia's free mobile app will display available parking locations to the user. The app will tell drivers which parking areas are full and which still have space in nearly real time. Drivers can avoid spending time looking for a parking space and spend their time enjoying the event. As a reward for downloading the app and using it to find parking for Festival of Books, Metropia is offering raffle prizes. Attendees may claim a prize by visiting Metropia at Booth No. 103 during the festival.
 

Share