Book Club
NHCC Book Club: Mexican Gothic—Silvia Moreno-Garcia
5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact cassandra.osterloh@state.nm.us “Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic is a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking novel. The main character, Noémi, receives a strange letter from her cousin, Catalina, who begs for help. She claims her new husband Virgil Doyle is poisoning her, that ‘fleshless things’ and ghosts trouble her, that ‘they will not let me go.’ Noémi — self-assured, chic and stubborn — leaves the glamor of 1950s Mexico City for the countryside, still depressed after a mining bust and fecund with secrets, (more...)
NHCC Book Club: Everyone Knows You Go Home—Natalia Sylvester
5:30 pm (MST) Live via Zoom To join, contact cassandra.osterloh@state.nm.us Winner of an International Latino Book Award. “The first time Isabel meets her father-in-law, Omar, he’s already dead—an apparition appearing uninvited on her wedding day. Her husband, Martin, still unforgiving for having been abandoned by his father years ago, confesses that he never knew the old man had died. Omar asks Isabel for the impossible: persuade Omar’s family—especially his wife, Elda—to let him redeem himself.” - Goodreads. Free community event
NHCC Book Club: Afterlife—Julia Alvarez
Live via Zoom or in-person5:30 pm (MDT) Live via Zoom To join, contact cassandra.osterloh@state.nm.us “Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play (more...)
NHCC Book Club: Queen of America
Live via Zoom or in-person5:30 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...)
Virtual Book Reading and Discussion: Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Mona at Sea
Live via Zoom or in-person6 pm (MST) Live Via Zoom. Register HERE Mona is a Millennial perfectionist who fails upwards in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis. Despite her potential, and her top-of-her-class college degree, Mona finds herself unemployed, living with her parents, and adrift in life and love. Mona's the sort who says exactly the right thing at absolutely the wrong moments, seeing the world through a cynic's eyes. In the financial and social malaise of the early 2000s, Mona walks a knife's edge as she faces down unemployment, (more...)
Virtual Book Reading and Discussion: Hakim Bellamy, Commissions y Corridos
Live via Zoom or in-person6 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: The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez
Live via Zoom or in-person5:30 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: The Five Wounds
Live via Zoom or in-person5:30 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
Virtual Book Reading and Discussion: Jessica Helen Lopez, The Blood Poems
Live via Zoom or in-person3 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...)
NHCC Book Club: The Taste of Sugar
Live via Zoom or in-person5:30 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...)