(TUCSON, Ariz.) – A favorite for readers who stay up late devouring the best of Southwest-themed books, the Library’s 44th annual Southwest Books of the Year is now available! In addition to the online version you can find on our website, you can find print copies at libraries statewide and more than a dozen local and regional stores, including Antigone Books and all three Bookmans.
This year’s selections range widely from fiction and poetry to cooking & food and art & photography. As always, it also features some great books for kids. This year's picks for children include Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, a vibrantly-illustrated, award-winning book, which the New York Times called, "wonderful and sweet." And, for young adults, there's The Everything I Have Lost, a coming-of-age story published by Cinco Puntos Press.
There are many more books waiting to be discovered in Southwest Books of the Year! Here are just some of the great reads selected by our panelists of voracious consumers of Southwest literature:
- Lydia Otero's frank and insightful memoir, In the Shadows of the Freeway: Growing up Brown & Queer
- A Good Map of All Things, a memorable novel by Alberto Álvaro Ríos, Arizona's first Poet Laureate
- Natalie Diaz's commanding and dynamic poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem
- Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, a timely look at the calculated cruelty at the heart of US border policy by award-winning correspondent, Jacob Soboroff
Our gratitude goes out to the amazing Southwest Books of the Year selection committee:
- Ann Dickinson, retired Pima County Public Library librarian
- Bruce Dinges, retired Director of Publications at the Arizona Historical Society
- Vicki Ann Duraine, Programming Librarian for Apache Junction Public Library
- Gregory McNamee, writer, editor, and photographer
- Mary Margaret Mercado, a bilingual public librarian for over 40 years who specializes in children's and Latinx services and programming.
- Margie Trujillo-Farmer, Literary Arts Librarian at Pima County Public Library, and Southwest Books of the Year project coordinator
- Christine Wald-Hopkins, a longtime book critic for national, local, and regional newspapers.
- Helene Woodhams, retired Pima County Public Library librarian who has been affiliated with Southwest Books of the Year since 2006
A note about this year's publication. We have a new standard to indicate the year of the Southwest Books of the Year
publication to be the same as the year this pamphlet is released. The books in this publication were released during the review period of November 2019-October 2020. Previous publications of the Southwest Books of the Year correlated to
the publication date of the books. In order to realign the dates, there will not be a Southwest Books of the Year marked as 2020.
Southwest Books of the Year is made possible by a gift from the Friends of the Pima County Public Library and by the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
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About Pima County Public Library
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