Sinking Bell & Atom City Book Release Reading
Bojan Louis: Sinking Bell & Sara Sams: Atom City
ABOUT THE EVENT
(5PM Doors, 6PM Reading. No cover.) Join writers and UA creative writing professors Bojan Louis and Sara Sams for a reading and book signing. Books will be available for purchase.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
Sinking Bell: Potent stories that offer a forceful vision of contemporary Navajo life, by an American Book Award winner
An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician’s plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a white woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions.
Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writers and musicians, construction workers, people passing through with the hope of something better somewhere else. His characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses; they raise families, choose families, and abandon families; they endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.
Atom City: “Sara Sams’ Atom City opens with a caution, “But Think, Are You Authorized to Tell It.” In poems of sharp wit and riveting investigation, tell it she does! Aware of the irony of “grow[ing] up happy / in a town that knitted / mushroom clouds,” Sams documents government duplicity and the revisionist history of developing the atomic bomb. The volume is punctuated by poems rich in details of her Appalachian roots and a magnificent series about local legend “Prophet John,” who foresaw the bomb a century ago. Exploratory poems from the “vast archive of the atoms” are tempered by tender poems of loss and love. This is a bold debut by a major new poet.” — Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
“Each poem Sara Sams writes is a reckoning with man-made devastation. In her brilliant debut collection, she proves herself to be a poet of immense personal and historical depth as she investigates complicity in one of history’s most frightening discoveries: the atomic bomb. The result is a haunting and intimate conversation about language and truth.”
— Diana Marie Delgado, author of Tracing the Horse
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai Dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He is the author of a book of poetry, Currents, which received an American Book Award. He has been a resident at MacDowell and teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.
Sara Sams is a writer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her current research investigates the influence that particle physics has had on contemporary poetics and learning how to be a mom. She has received teaching fellowships from the National University of Singapore and for the Ministry of Education in Logroño, Spain. She now teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.