Tucson book festival to feature prestigious award winners

This year’s winners of two prestigious book awards — the National Book Award for nonfiction and the Booker Prize for fiction — will be featured at the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books.

Among more than 300 authors who will appear at the festival, March 15-16 at the University of Arizona, they’ll be joined by six other writers who caught the attention of National Book Awards judges this year: four finalists, in fiction, young people’s literature and poetry; one semifinalist in poetry; and an author who was longlisted for the nonfiction honor.

Several of these writers’ topics resonate especially in Southern Arizona, from human smuggling across the border; to copper mines that are controversial but help power green technologies; to Indigenous families whose elders were forced into boarding schools; to poetry that layers English and Spanish together.

Mark your calendars for:

Jason De León

Jason De León will come to Tucson with “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” which received the 2024 National Book Award for nonfiction.

It also made notable-books-of-the-year lists compiled by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, NPR and Time. “A work of extraordinary reportage and compassion ... (it) will shock you, move you, and leave you changed,” says a review by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Matthew Desmond.

“Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year.

“Yet the real lives and work of smugglers — or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services — are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion-dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years,” the National Book Awards description says.

“’Soldiers and Kings’ gives voice and unprecedented context to the people, most of them young men, who make a precarious living smuggling migrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States,” says a website at UCLA, where De León is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o studies.

A 2017 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow, De León also authored 2015’s “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail”.

Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey will come to the festival with “Orbital,” which won the 2024 Booker Prize as the year’s best novel published in Great Britain.

“Six astronauts observe Earth’s splendour while navigating bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Compact yet beautifully expansive, this is a love letter to our planet,” the Booker Prize judges wrote, using the British spelling of splendor.

The astronauts rotate on the International Space Station. “They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: What is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?”

Harvey has been called “this generation’s Virginia Woolf,” and she told The Guardian, “I admire Woolf probably more than any other writer I can think of. I didn’t think about parallels with The Waves while writing Orbital, but I can see there’s something (similar) about the way voices surface and dissipate.” Woolf’s 1931 novel “The Waves,” like “Orbital,” features the voices of six characters.

In a Q&A about the Booker Prize, Harvey said: “I think a good book is one that when you close it, gives the feeling of perfect inevitability. So there’s a sense that its story couldn’t have been told any other way.”

Harvey’s previous books included “The Wilderness” about dementia; “The Western Wind” about a murder in medieval Somerset; and “The Shapeless Unease,” a memoir of her chronic insomnia.

She lives in England in Bath, Somerset, and teaches creative writing.

‘Pemi Aguda

The Tucson Festival of Books will also feature three other authors who were finalists for 2024 National Book Awards: ‘Pemi Aguda, Violet Duncan and Josh Galarza.

Aguda’s “Ghostroots” was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, whose website describes it as:

“A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos (Nigeria) where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties ... In ‘Manifest,’ a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter’s face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In ‘Breastmilk,’ a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, when she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother’s feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood.”

Originally from Lagos, Aguda lives in Philadelphia.

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Violet Duncan

Violet Duncan, an Arizona author, is Plains Cree and Taino from Kehewin Cree Nation.

“After becoming a mother of four and seeing the need for greater Native representation in literature, Violet authored picturebooks.

“Her new middle school novel, ‘Buffalo Dreamer,’ was named a 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Finalist,” the festival’s website says.

The book is “an illuminating novel about a family healing from the brutal treatment of their elders, who’d been forced to attend federally run Indian Boarding Schools intent on erasing their native identity,” says the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

Josh Galarza

The debut novel by longtime Montessori educator Josh Galarza, “The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky,” was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for young people’s literature.

“Ever since cancer invaded his adoptive mother’s life,” the book’s main character, Brett, “feels like he’s losing everything, most of all control. To cope, Brett fuels all of his anxieties into epic fantasies, including his intergalactic Kid Condor comic book series, which features food constellations.”

Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, said: “Brett’s quirky voice — a mix of self-conscious thoughts, Kid Condor mythology, and bro-isms (‘You ready for some nuggs, bruh?’) — tempers this funny yet bruising narrative about one teen’s experience with grief and disordered eating.”

m.s. RedCherries

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in New York City.

Her debut collection, "mother," was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry this year.

"mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born," says its publisher.

The award judges wrote: “'Riddled with shadowed humor that would bait the consciousness,'” these poems tenderly, vulnerably, and fearlessly sequence threads of familial bonds, heredity, and Indigenous identity. With a captivating and conversant voice, m.s. RedCherries maps the intersections of the historical with the personal and deftly binds the two like strands of DNA, creating the spark of life that courses through this vital work."

Octavio Quintanilla

Two who also caught the eyes of National Book Award judges this year will also be at the festival: Octavio Quintanilla, a semifinalist in poetry; and Ernest Scheyder, who was longlisted for nonfiction.

“In ‘The Book of Wounded Sparrows,’ his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream,” says the awards’ website.

“This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently — a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers ....”

Quintanilla was San Antonio, Texas, Poet Laureate from 2018-20.

Ernest Scheyder

A senior correspondent for Reuters, Ernest Scheyder “covers the green energy transition and the minerals that undergird it.”

His current book is “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives.”

“To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, and other vital building blocks. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change and powering crucial technologies,” says the National Book Awards website.

The National Book Foundation sponsors the National Book Awards, saying its mission “is to celebrate the best literature published in the United States, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in our culture.”