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Books That Matter: UA Press

An anti-racist social justice bookshelf that highlights specific books as a way to increase visibility and include everyone!

UA Press

Other UA Press titles

2023 UA Press Featured Titles

Aina Hanau / Birth Land

'Āina Hānau / Birth Lands is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. These poems cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people

Lotería

Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Conjuring dreamlike visions of extravagant fruits and rivers animated by the power of divination, these poems follow the speaker from the lash of war's arrival through an urgent escape and reinvention in a land that saves with maternal instinct but also smothers its children. In this bilingual collection, Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres threads together the stories of family dynamics and the realities of migration with the archetypes of tarot and the traditional Lotería game, used for centuries as an object of divination and entertainment. Through these themes and images, the poems in Lotería narrate intimate moments in the lives and journeys of migrants, refugees, and all who have been forced into metamorphosis in order to reach the other side of the river. 

Photo of Juan Felipe Herrera in front of a colorful mural

Juan Felipe Herrera

For the first time, this book presents the distinguished, prolific, and highly experimental writer Juan Felipe Herrera. This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading experts offers critical approaches on Herrera, who transcends ethnic and mainstream poetics. It expertly demonstrates Herrera's versatility, resourcefulness, innovations, and infinite creativity. As a poet Herrera has had an enormous impact within and beyond Chicano poetics. He embodies much of the advancements and innovations found in American and Latin American poetry from the early l970s to the present. His writings have no limits or boundaries, indulging in the quotidian as well as the overarching topics of his era at different periods of his life. Both Herrera and his work are far from being unidimensional. His poetics are eclectic, incessantly diverse, transnational, unorthodox, and distinctive. 

Indigenous Justice and Gender

This new volume offers a broad overview of topics pertaining to gender-related health, violence, and healing. Employing a strength-based approach (as opposed to a deficit model), the chapters address the resiliency of Indigenous women and two-spirit people in the face of colonial violence and structural racism. The book centers the concept of "rematriation"--the concerted effort to place power, peace, and decision making back into the female space, land, body, and sovereignty--as a decolonial practice to combat injustice. Chapters include such topics as reproductive health, diabetes, missing and murdered Indigenous women, Indigenous women in the academy, and Indigenous women and food sovereignty.      
Ebook available 

Indigenous peoples looking at smoke from an electric plant

Carbon Sovereignty

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation's largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation's strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation's embrace and its rejection of a coal economy. For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change. The rise and fall of coal magnify the nuance and complexity of change. Historical and contemporary issues intermingle in everyday life with lasting consequences.
Ebook available 

Walking Together

Migration through Mexico is violent and uncertain, yet in Walking Together we see how this experience bonds some people together like family even though they may not have started that way before the journey. Migrants in transit form several types of social networks, develop trust, and engage in acts of solidarity. The need to be recognized and grieved, compounded by the practical use of pooling information and resources, leads migrants to form small, strong groups called road families. Through the generalized sharing of information and small items such as food and blankets, migrants also form a transient community that includes everyone on the road at the same time. Sociologist Alejandra Díaz de León shows the trajectories of families that left together, showing, surprisingly, that families might not be the best social arrangement in transit. Drawing on multisited research, this work contributes to debates on the role of social networks in clandestine migration processes and to discussions on how people create social networks and trust under violent and stressful situations. The detailed ethnographic narratives and accessible writing weave together theory with empirical observations to highlight and humanize the migrant experience. Sitting at the intersection of border studies, immigration studies, and Latinx studies, this concise volume shows how Central American migrants in transit through Mexico survive the precarious and unpredictable road by forming different types of social ties.