Access Utah

Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers’ heads for a long time to come.

Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction? Can it ever be fixed? These are the questions that motivate Michael Tomasky’s deeply original examination into the origins of our hopelessly polarized nation. “One of America’s finest political commentators” (Michael J. Sandel), Tomasky ranges across centuries and disciplines to show how America has almost always had two dominant parties that are existentially, and often violently, opposed. When he turns to our current era, he does so with striking insight that will challenge readers to reexamine what they thought they knew. Finally, not content merely to diagnose these problems, Tomasky offers a provocative agenda for how we can help fix our broken political system―from ranked-choice voting and at-large congressional elections to expanding high school civics education nationwide.

Tyehimba Jess is winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book “Olio.” With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, his much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. “Olio” is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

How can the stories we tell protect the places we love? Friends of Cedar Mesa and Torrey House Press are presenting a conversation on the unique ways desert communities can organize around and diversify narratives to protect Utah’s red rock landscapes. Desert Cabal Expanding the Desert Narrative is Friday, March 1 at 7 PM at the Bears Ears Education Center,

The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present In his new book “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis focuses on the often-asked question “What would the Founding Fathers think?” He examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular topics using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and, in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the disturbing impasse of today’s political conflicts. He discusses Jefferson and the issue of racism, Adams and the specter of economic inequality, Washington and American imperialism, Madison and the doctrine of original intent. Through these juxtapositions Ellis illuminates the obstacles and pitfalls paralyzing contemporary discussions of these fundamentally important issues.

“Bridge of Clay” is the new sweeping family saga from Markus Zusak, author of the international bestseller “The Book Thief,” which swept the world and was made into a movie.

Clouds, Mountains, Birds, Different Ways of Speaking. Things That Matter, and Things That Do Not Matter. Things Found in a Local Grocery Store. Things Found in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Billboards, Clouds. One Week in April. Beautiful Things. Fires.

In their new book “Breakpoint: Reckoning with America's Environmental Crises,” eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple examine the looming threats from recent hurricanes and fires, industrial agriculture, river mismanagement, extreme weather events, drought, and rising sea levels that, they say, are pushing the country toward the breaking point of ecological and economic collapse.

For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

Author and ethnographer Rodney Frey won the 2018 Evans Handcart Award from Utah State University's Mountain West Center for Regional Studies for his book Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition (Washington State University Press, 2017).

Lily Hoang’s latest book is “A Bestiary,” In this genre-transcending work, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum as the winner of the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection, Hoang teases apart mythology, familial memory, and investigative essay into searing fragments, then weaves them into a dazzling swarm. Hoang models her postcolonial bestiary on the Chinese zodiac—“A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats./ You desire the human equivalent”—and uses it to represent such concepts as fidelity, beauty, and “the disgust of desire.” In doing so, she confronts such topics as feminine subjection, familial suffering due to assimilation (“‘Vietnamese women suffer better than all other people,’ my mother used to tell me”), and a sister’s addiction and death with a precision that is by turns vulnerable and justly incensed. Hoang subverts the moralizing tendencies of folklore to form a new hybrid mythology that, like all belief systems, reassures the believer—and the reader—that human vu

A recent article in the online magazine Yale Environment 360 is headlined “The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits: Will the Colorado Run Dry?” And the sub-headline: “As the Southwest faces rapid growth and unrelenting drought, the Colorado River is in crisis, with too many demands on its diminishing flow. Now those who depend on the river must confront the hard reality that their supply of Colorado water may be cut off.”

Our guest for the hour is Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and newly elected chair of the Global Assembly of Amnesty Interational. She gave the keynote speech for the Tanner Center for Human Rights lecture series on August 30th at the University of Utah. The title of her lecture was "Never Again is Now: Remembering and Reaffirming Our Collective Commitment to Protecting Civil Rights."

The USU Institute of Government and Politics’ Foxley Forum presented a talk by former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake yesterday titled “Is Polarizing Partisanship the New Normal?”

In the age of the Nano-second, folklore studies claim a perspective on the critical importance of the short-lived, as observed in numerous traditional forms such as memorial altars, henna-painted Yemen brides, and evaporative moments, such as the traces left by marginalized queer encounters or the reformulation in art of Mormon legend by local Provo artist Bryan Hutchison.

The received idea of Native American history–as promulgated by books like Dee Brown’s mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee–has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well.

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.

On opening day of the 2019 Utah Legislature we’re at the State Capitol. We’ll speak with Utah Governor Gary Herbert; Senate Majority Leader Evan Vickers; Senate Minority Leader Karen Mayne; House Executive Appropriations Chair Brad Last and House Minority Leader Brian King. We’ll discuss propositions approved by the voters last year on medical marijuana, medicaid expansion, and redistricting. We’ll also talk about air quality, education, the budget, taxes and more.

An event titled the “Southern Utah Clean Air Forum” was held recently in St. George. It was billed as “a discussion of proposed federal, state & local legislation focused on reducing energy emissions to improve our health and our children’s futures.” As we head toward the opening of the Utah Legislature next week, we’ll talk about clean air and the climate with three of the panelists from the forum on Thursday’s Access Utah.

In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions.