Paisley Rekdal Reimagines History in West: A Translation
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.
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. By Kathryne Lim
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. By Emily Arntsen
Books + LiteraryInside Southwest Contemporary
Southwest Contemporary’s staff—Roman Aragón, Natalie Hegert, Steve Jansen, and Lauren Tresp—pick their favorite reading materials of 2023. By Southwest Contemporary
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. By Robin Babb
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. By Barbara Purcell
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. By Camille LeFevre
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. By Radius Books
Books + LiteraryArizonaFeatureVol. 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. By Camille LeFevre
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. By Natalie Hegert
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. By Joshua Ware
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. By Willow Naomi Curry
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. By Michael Joseph Walsh
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. By Willow Naomi Curry
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. By Kathryne Lim
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. By Kathryne Lim
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. By Daisy Geoffrey
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... By Titus O'Brien
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. By Julia Brennan
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. By Ken Baumann
Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones," made New Mexico her home and the center of her writing practice fifty years ago. By Jenn Shapland
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... By Stanley Crawford
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... By Joaquin Gomez
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. By Jenn Shapland
February 1983: a man in coat and scarf stands on a sidewalk among various street vendors at Cooper Square in downtown New York City. At his feet, a collection of perfectly spherical white forms... By Chelsea Weathers
The leaves in the trees, one night—more leaves than there are stars in the sky, more leaves than there are eyes to look up at the night sky to see them with— By Peter Markus
All this madness has made me terribly sad. I didn't buy the diet pills because they were too expensive. Or perhaps, that's life. The world tells you for so long... By Shayla Lawz
The phrase "Santa Fe women" calls to mind a range of women throughout history... By Jenn Shapland
On April 1, 2014, the editors at ArtSlant reported that MoMA would “give the museum over exclusively to women artists for the entire year of 2015.”... By Jenn Shapland
In the late '80s and early '90s, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead and New Yorker Poetry Editor Kevin Young were a couple of kids at Harvard. They became friends long before either had a writing career to speak of, but in Whitehead's words... By Jenn Shapland
When Jenny George read from her collection The Dream of Reason at Collected Works in early April, her voice was soft, slow, and steady. Like her poems, her reading rendered heartbreaking compressions of language and feeling into something delicate to behold. Her images ... By Jenn Shapland
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable... By Diane Armitage
Winter in the northern Midwest is not a place I return to in person, at least not willingly. It is a place I dread for its deadly overcast sadness, a dread that, I learned from Michigan poet Emily Van Kley's collection, constitutes its own heady nostalgia. The Cold and the Rust… By Jenn Shapland
Calling herself a "visual artist who writes," author Verónica Gerber Bicecci approaches fiction from the conceptual and the personal simultaneously: What does it mean, logically, for a person to be missing? And how does it feel? Bicecci incorporates line drawings throughout Empty... By Jenn Shapland
In the last year, Aleksandar Hemon’s writings in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the perils of Trumpism have served as my touchstones, pieces I bookmark and return to and share when I’m feeling especially low, especially unable to proceed. Hemon is a Chicago-based... By Jenn Shapland
Kate Ingold is a visual artist and poet working in a variety of media. In her work, she examines issues of disturbance, reparation, and collapse, and the nostalgia and regret that can accompany loss.... By Kate Ingold
Zadie Smith is the reason I left Facebook. As I was reading—actually, as my partner, who snatched it up the moment it arrived, was reading—her new collection of essays Feel Free, I revisited a piece of hers I remember from several years ago to see if it held up. "Generation Why?"... By Jenn Shapland
Each January, as Santa Fe et environs settle back into their quiet winter ways following the bustle of holidays, markets, and festivals, the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing gathers at IAIA for a week of workshops and unforgettable public readings. This is the only... By Jenn Shapland
As a difficult year winds to a close, I’ve been thinking about what books made a difference for me in 2017. What changed my mind, or opened it, or gave me language to understand and express the present moment? Here are three 2017 titles that made me see things in a new way... By Jenn Shapland
Each year, we ask The Magazine’s contributors to pick their favorite recent (or recently relevant) books to recommend for your holiday-season reading. Read on for their suggestions... By Southwest Contemporary
Jenn Shapland reviews three recent book releases: The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (nonfiction), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (fiction), and For Want of Water: And Other Poems by Sasha Pimentel (poetry) ... By Jenn Shapland
Sometimes a writer’s subject finds her. Valeria Luiselli, a novelist and essayist from Mexico City, was waiting for her green card when she and her niece started working as interpreters at the New York immigration court. Luiselli had heard from her own immigration lawyer that after... By Jenn Shapland
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