Books + LiteraryInside Southwest Contemporary
The Artist's Way for werewolves, a guide to forgetting the Alamo, and other compelling reads from the Southwest Contemporary editorial team.
January 06, 2025
Despite economic flux, new independent book publishers are blooming—and veteran presses are thriving—across New Mexico.
December 12, 2024
Paisley Rekdal will read selections from West: A Translation with live guidance from the audience in a powerful, informative, and cathartic experience at 516 Words on Thursday, December 5, in Albuquerque.
November 20, 2024
In Oracle Bones from Red Butte Press, a writer and an artist wander the Utah wilderness to discern the future. Then it comes true.
May 15, 2024
Diné artist, writer, and educator Brendan Basham approaches writing as he does life: as a process of transformation.
April 16, 2024
Clottee Hammons, the Phoenix artist, curator, and knowledge-keeper who leads Emancipation Arts, has spent decades elevating Black history, arts, and culture while combatting historical and contemporary racism in Arizona.
March 22, 2024
InterviewUtahVol. 9 Living Histories
Salt Lake City-based writer Paisley Rekdal discusses poetry as an archive and cultural connecter in the history of the transcontinental railroad.
March 01, 2024
FeatureUtahVol. 9 Living Histories
After living at an abandoned commune in rural Utah for eight years, author Emma Kemp blends history with memoir in her forthcoming book.
March 01, 2024
Books + LiteraryInside Southwest Contemporary
Southwest Contemporary’s staff—Roman Aragón, Natalie Hegert, Steve Jansen, and Lauren Tresp—pick their favorite reading materials of 2023.
January 04, 2024
Santa Fe-based Jenn Shapland, author of multi-award-winning My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, chats about the writing life and her new collection of essays, Thin Skin.
October 25, 2023
If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change looks at global warming with a right brain/left brain lineup of scientists, journalists, and artists.
October 24, 2023
Torrey House Press, an Intermountain West nonprofit environmental book publisher founded in 2010, renews its commitment to Western voices with a new focus on diverse perspectives.
September 21, 2023
SponsoredBooks + LiteraryNew Mexico
Join art book publisher Radius Books for Artist Weekend 2023, a free community celebration with artists, writers, and collaborators in New Mexico.
August 01, 2023
FeatureArizonaVol. 7 Finding Water in the West
Tucson-based author Lydia Millet reflects on themes of climate change, place, and privilege in her new book Dinosaurs.
March 03, 2023
Abecedario de Juárez by artist Alice Leora Briggs and photojournalist Julián Cardona is partly an illustrated glossary of narcolenguaje and partly a collection of stories from the streets.
August 19, 2022
Denver poet, librarian, gallerist, and comedian Sommer Browning talks about her new book Good Actors and how it relates to other art forms and interests.
May 25, 2022
Drawing on public and private archives and fifty years of personal documentation, Anne Elise Urrutia’s book Miraflores brings to life her great-grandfather’s San Antonio garden in unmatched detail.
May 19, 2022
Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Aerial Concave Without Cloud is an extended meditation on how thinking through and with light can help to illuminate profound personal grief.
May 11, 2022
Denver-based poet Nicky Beer’s Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a clever, probing look into the collective desires and fears underlying our love of illusion.
March 29, 2022
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, renowned New Mexico-based poet, opens up about her personal poetry process and collaboration across artistic disciplines.
February 25, 2022
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars, the latest book by the New Mexico-based poet, makes a case for communication with star beings.
November 16, 2021
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 2 Flights of Fancy
For the past ten years, Friends of the Orphan Signs has been placing small moments of wonder on empty, abandoned, and suspended-in-time signs that anchor Albuquerque to its past as a stop along Route 66.
April 30, 2021
Born in Germany in 1881, Baumann’s parents moved to Chicago when he was ten, and the budding artist began attending the School of the Art Institute in his teens, at one of its most fecund and influential periods. Baumann wasn’t the first of his Chicago peers to discover New Mexico, but he planted deeper roots than most. Fellow master printmaker and Baumann’s soul-heir Tom Leech contributes a heartfelt reflection on decades spent working with the artist’s materials, upholding his legacy at Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors...
January 28, 2020
Julia Brennan is a writer and performer from central New York. Her work has been published in Hotel America, Big Big Wednesday, and Tarpaulin Sky Press, among other publications. Her debut novel, Hunting Season, won the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award and will be published in 2020.
August 28, 2019
About the pain. I’ll first describe it clinically, as if I were a camera. I began to sweat everywhere after a flash of heat lit my skin (the whole organ). I lost the ability or will to control the movement of my eyes, which rolled around the room. My eyes also streamed tears, though my face lacked the grimaces and spasms which normally accompany them. Finally, I moaned.
August 01, 2019
Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones," made New Mexico her home and the center of her writing practice fifty years ago.
July 26, 2019
After planting and harvesting crops for over forty years, you would think a being might finally comprehend the ephemeral nature of all things. Not, alas, this one. At least not within my deep inner recesses, in the private folds of knowing...
June 26, 2019
John Shepherd’s pack weighed him down, straps cutting into fleece, water bottle digging into his hip. The hike had taken longer than he’d anticipated. The light was fading...
May 24, 2019
1 We drove to a place to look up...
April 26, 2019
I still feel like a New Mexico writer in part, an important part, and my plans are to secure a little place there to live at least part of the time...New Mexico inspires me as no other place. I consider it the birthplace of my poetry, though of course, my poetry was set in place for generations, through all the speakers, singers, and artists in my ancestral lines.
January 30, 2019
