The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O'odham Country Published more than forty years ago, The Desert Smells Like Rain remains a classic work about nature, how to respect it, and what transplants can learn from the longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O’odham people. In this work, Gary Paul Nabhan brings O’odham voices to the page at every turn. He writes elegantly of how they husband scant water supplies, grow crops, and utilize edible wild foods. Woven through his account are coyote tales, O’odham children’s impressions of the desert, and observations of the political problems that come with living on both sides of an international border. Nabhan conveys the everyday life and extraordinary perseverance of these desert people.

University of Arizona Press, Booth #244 (Seats 1)
Sat, Mar 15, 12:00 pm - 12:30 pm
Nature / Environment

Author: Gary Nabhan

Explore the rich, multi-cultural tapestry of the Southwest borderlands through captivating narratives of resilience and influence, presented by distinguished historians and biographers.

UA Library/Special Collections (Seats 110)  
Sat, Mar 15, 1:00 pm - 1:55 pm
History / Biography
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)  

Panelists: Victoria Blanco, Gary Nabhan, Richard Parker
Moderator: José Lucero

Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance A century ago, William Carlos Williams’s “In the American Grain” profiled Anglo, French, and Spanish conquistadors, tyrants, preachers, and thought leaders who first shaped American culture. Since then, waves of resistance and disruptive innovation have flooded into the rest of America from the arid, southwestern margins of the US-Mexico borderlands. Now, in “Against the American Grain,” Gary Paul Nabhan—cultural ecologist, environmental historian, and lyric poet of the American Southwest—illuminates the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. Whether Indigenous, LatinX, priests, nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it is the resisters, performers, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins who are constantly reshaping America. They have, against all odds, recolored and recovered the future of North America through outrageous acts of resistance. After reading the stories of Estevanico el Moro, Maria de Ágreda, Teresita de Cábora, Coyote Iguana, Woody Guthrie, Tim X. Hernandez, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Reyes Lopez Tijerana, Arturo Sandoval, Lalo Guererro, John Fife, Danny and Luis Valdez, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, and many more, we can never think about America the same way again. In Nabhan’s magisterial, radical recounting, cross-cultural collaborations have changed the grain of American life to one that is many-colored, once again flourishing with fragrance, faith, and fecund ideas.

University of New Mexico Press, Booth #215 (Seats 1)
Sat, Mar 15, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
History / Biography

Author: Gary Nabhan