Book Club

Virtual Book Reading and Discussion: Jessica Helen Lopez, The Blood Poems

3 pm (MST) Live Via Zoom. Register HERE The Blood Poems is one part bloodletting, one part healing, and one part sensuous celebration as Jessica Helen Lopez lays out what it means to be a strong brown woman, a single mother, and the kickass bard that the twenty-first century needs. Lopez openly faces a damaging childhood, sex, divorce, and racial injustice in these poems. She proves that love is as complicated as lovemaking — messy and lusty, raucous and powerful, capable of amazing highs and abysmal lows. (more…)

Virtual Book Reading and Discussion: Stephen Graham Jones, Memorial Ride

6 pm (MST) Live Via Zoom. Register HERE Memorial Ride is a high-speed, ragtag chase across the American Southwest. Cooper Town, an American Indian soldier, has returned from the Middle East to attend hi father’s funeral, make some quick cash off his father’s old Harley, and spend a whirlwind weekend with his girlfriend, Sheri Mun. However, when Coop runs afoul of the violent John Wayne gang, he and Sheri Mun have no choice but to twist the throttle back on that storied chopper and make tracks. In (more…)

Virtual Book Reading and Discussion: Hakim Bellamy, Commissions y Corridos

6 pm (MST) Live Via Zoom. Register HERE Hakim Bellamy’s latest collection rings with the same power and grace as the people he lauds within its pages, including Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King Jr. He celebrates Albuquerque and New Mexico, taking the good with the bad, and reminds Bur-queños that any day when you wake up along the Río Grande is a good day. As Bellamy celebrates the power of creativity and community within the city and the nation, he also demands that we face our society’s faults, (more…)

NHCC Book Club: Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America

5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact Dr. Patricia Marie Perea by emailing her at Patricia.perea@state.nm.us “In Once I Was You, Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the south side of Chicago and documenting the existential wasteland of immigration detention camps for news outlets that often challenged her work. In these pages, she offers a personal and eye-opening account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also enabled willful negligence and profiteering at (more…)

NHCC Book Club: The Wind That Lays Waste

5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact Dr. Patricia Marie Perea by emailing her at Patricia.perea@state.nm.us “The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God or fate leads them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and a young boy named Tapioca. As a long day passes, curiosity and intrigue transform into an unexpected intimacy (more…)

NHCC Book Club: The Taste of Sugar

5:30 pm (MDT) Live via Zoom To join, contact Dr. Patricia Marie Perea by emailing her at Patricia.perea@state.nm.us “It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the (more…)

NHCC Book Club: The Five Wounds

5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact cassandra.osterloh@state.nm.us “From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel about a New Mexican family’s extraordinary year of love and sacrifice. The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.” – Goodreads Free community event

NHCC Book Club: The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez

5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact cassandra.osterloh@state.nm.us “In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist’s daughter. But as they’ll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they (more…)

NHCC Book Club: Queen of America

5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact cassandra.osterloh@state.nm.us “Beginning where Luis Alberto Urrea’s bestselling The Hummingbird’s Daughter left off, Queen of America finds young Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and “Saint of Cabora,” with her father in 1892 Arizona. But, besieged by pilgrims in desperate need of her healing powers, and pursued by assassins, she has no choice but to flee the borderlands and embark on an extraordinary journey into the heart of turn-of-the-century America. Teresita’s passage will take her to New York, San Francisco, and St. Louis, (more…)

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