30 Minutes celebrates International Women’s Day by discussing the upcoming 2020 Tucson Festival of Books taking place on March 14-15 on the University of Arizona Campus.
Lynn Wiese Sneyd is the Literary Consultant for the Tucson Festival of Books. Kimi Eisele is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of THE LIGHTEST OBJECT IN THE UNIVERSE (Algonquin Books 2019), a novel about love, loss, and adaptation in a post-apocalyptic America.
Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Orion Magazine, High Country News, and elsewhere. She holds a master’s degree in geography from the University of Arizona, where in 1998 she founded You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography. Her performance works address human-nature relationships and have explored the iconic saguaro cactus, endangered species, and water. She has received grants from the Arts Foundation of Southern Arizona, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Tucson and works for the Southwest Folklife Alliance.
Sneyd provided an overview of the festival and some highlights. Eisele discussed aspects of her writing process and the publishing journey. The Lightest Object in the Universe is particularly timely as it begins after a global economic collapse and much of the population being wiped out by the flu. Says Eisele on her twitter account @KimiEisele “So, at the Tucson Festival of Books I’m speaking on a panel called “Comes the Apocalypse.” The other two writers canceled because of coronavirus. I mean, you can’t write this shit. Except, we did.”
Recorded and produced by Amanda Shauger.
You can listen to excerpts from Kimi Eisele’s book launch at Exo Books in July 2019 here.
