Debuts September 2024 — State of Fire
Bestselling Author Obi Kaufmann Seeks to Shift Our Understanding of California’s Fires
In this artful meditation, the beloved painter and eco-philosopher reassesses wildfire as a force for regeneration, rather than destruction.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — There may be no greater representation of California’s ecological crisis than its fires. In recent years, they have become larger and deadlier than ever before, forcing us to reckon with how we have failed the land and the incredible cost of that negligence. Obi Kaufmann’s lushly illustrated new book, The State of Fire: Why California Burns (on sale September 17, 2024), explores how we got here and how we may get out.
The story of California fires is surprising and ancient. Fire has always played a vital role in our ecosystem—it fertilizes the soil, creates easier hunting grounds for certain animals, and gives space for plants to root. In short: life flourishes after fires. But the fires of today are different. Centuries of logging, a lack of controlled burns, and the spread of invasive plant species has given rise to the gigafire and its corollary problems: massive smoke covers, erosion, mass death events in animal populations.
In this new book, Obi Kaufmann delves into the history, science, and future of fire ecology. With Kaufmann’s signature artistry and deep research this book looks at some of the most devastating fires of modern history and also the many ways that our ecosystem benefits from fire. It’s an ultimately hopeful book. One that points to the many ways that we may coexist with fire and responsibly steward California into a more balanced future.
“For every point of despair,” Obi says, “I have a counterpoint of hope for the survival and restoration of the natural world. … As long as there is time, there is hope.”
Praise for Obi Kaufmann
“Obi Kaufmann’s books are like bibles to me. . . . They’re beautifully drawn, written, printed and bound, and they explain California’s natural beauty better than anything I’ve read before.”
—Dave Eggers
“[Kaufmann’s] approach encourages a love of place, which is often the first step toward wanting to protect and preserve it.”
—American Scientist
“Kaufmann’s gaze easily ranges from the micro to the macro. … As a reader you are invited to join him on a journey of discovery—not as a passenger but as an active participant.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[Kaufmann] swirls research with poetry, the personal and human with the collective and ecological.”
—Mother Jones
“His deft hand and knowing eye convey not only wild beauty but some of the essence of his subjects. … They offer rich amounts of information, with varied but encompassing glimpses of the features he observes from place to place and how all the parts work together.”
—The Press Democrat
“Kaufmann’s expressive writing is matched by his creativity as an artist … Audubon-esque in style and scope.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“Obi wants to inspire us to be optimistic, not fatalistic about the world we find ourselves in. Stories of recovery are all around us if we open our eyes. He believes we can, indeed, reverse course and save what we have inherited.”
—EcoNews
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
kalie@heydaybooks.com
Megan Posco
Publicist, Posco Publicity
megan@poscopublicity.com
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Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller), The State of Water (2019), The Forests of California (2020), The Coasts of California (2022), and The Deserts of California (2023), all published by Heyday. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings at his handle @coyotethunder on Instagram. His speaking tour dates are available at californiafieldatlas.com, and his essays are posted at coyoteandthunder.com.
Debuts August 2024 — Redress (paperback release)
Leader of the Japanese American Reparations Movement Shares Inside Story of the Historic Campaign for Redress
Former director of the longest standing Asian American civil rights group shares strategies and provides a roadmap for other reparations movements
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Signed in 1942, Executive Order 9066 mandated the forced evacuation, dispossession, and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese people residing in the United States, solely on account of their ancestry. Forty years later, the US Congress declared that this “decision to exclude and detain was a result of racism, wartime hysteria, and a failure of leadership” and authorized an unprecedented reparations program to the survivors. This unprecedented civil rights victory was the culmination of a years-long restorative justice movement, and Redress: The Inside Story of the Campaign for Japanese American Reparations by John Tateishi (forthcoming in paperback August 2024) chronicles that effort through the eyes of one of its chief stewards.
Tateishi, the former national director of the redress campaign for the Japanese American Citizens’ League, shares the ins and outs of the decades-long drive to raise public consciousness and lobby the nation’s leaders to recognize and repair the injustice of wartime incarceration. “Convince the public, and you convince Congress,” was his guiding mantra, and it would inform the public affairs and legislative strategies that he and fellow activists pursued until their goal was realized: a presidential apology and pardons, and $20,000 in compensation to survivors (equivalent to $80,000 in 2024 dollars).
In Redress, Tateishi takes readers through the public debates and backroom bargains, media milestones and pitched battles in Washington that led to the legislative victory for Japanese American reparations, offering a roadmap for other social justice movements along the way. Since its original publication in hardcover, Redress has gone on to inspire thought leaders and policymakers invested in the movement for Black reparations in particular—including members of the California State Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for Black People and advocates of US House Bill 40.
“The readers for whom this book seems to have resonated most have been proponents for the Black reparations movement,” says Tateishi in his preface to the new edition, “Recognizing the sliver of an opening that the Japanese American redress campaign once had can offer hope for what may come through the sliver of an opening that the campaign for Black reparations has now.”
Advance Praise for Redress
“At a moment when talk of reparations is in the air, there is no more inspiring story to tell than of the time that tens of thousands of Americans who actually won them. Redress gives us an insider’s step-by-step view of how a bold and determined group of Japanese Americans achieved an unprecedented goal that, at the beginning, looked impossible. We have a lot to learn from their extraordinary success..”
—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
“The lessons learned and the history made in this book are indispensable for all those who are seeking redress and reparations for their own communities today.”
—Karen Korematsu, founder and executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute
“John Tateishi, who was on the front lines of the Japanese American redress movement, has written a compelling blow-by-blow account of that struggle. This is a quintessentially American story of how, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, justice nevertheless prevails.”
—Jay Feldman, author of Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America
“Redress is a must-read for understanding the success of the redress campaign and how it changed the course of American history.”
—Norman Mineta, former U.S. secretary of transportation
“A fascinating insider’s account of a historic campaign by a marginalized community and its allies to see redress from the most powerful country in the world. Simply compelling!”
—Dale Minami, lead counsel in overturning Korematsu v. United States
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com.
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John Tateishi, born in Los Angeles in 1939, was incarcerated from ages three to six at Manzanar, one of America’s ten World War II concentration camps. He studied English Literature at UC Berkeley and attended UC Davis for graduate studies. He played important roles in leading the campaign for Japanese American redress, and as the director of the Japanese American Citizens League, he used the lessons of the campaign to ensure that the rights of this nation’s Arab and Muslim communities were protected after 9/11.
Debuts August 2024 — Heyday at Fifty
Heyday Debuts Anniversary Anthology Celebrating Half a Century of Publishing in 2024
Founded in 1974, the fiercely independent Bay Area-based publisher of California nature, arts and culture, Indigenous perspectives, and social justice turns 50.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Heyday, the independent nonprofit press chronicling the arts, cultures, and natural landscapes of California celebrates half a century of publishing in 2024. The publishing house founded in 1974 by Malcolm Margolin continues its mission fifty years later to explore the wild wonders of the Golden State, plumb its rich cultural history, center the voices of the West Coast’s first peoples, and promote social justice. In honor of its golden jubilee the press will publish an anniversary anthology, Heyday at Fifty (debuting August 2024), drawing on highlights from its five-decade deep list.
Heyday began when founder Margolin—described by Rebecca Solnit as “the glue that holds the sweetest parts of California together”—wrote, designed, and typeset his first book, East Bay Out. His publication four years later of The Ohlone Way would go on to become a classic in its field, selling over 100,000 copies. Over the course of Margolin’s 41 years as Heyday’s publisher, his “one-man band” grew into a small but mighty award-winning publishing powerhouse that, in addition to publishing award-winning books, incubated the magazines Bay Nature (now independently operated) and News from Native California, a quarterly magazine centering the vitality of California’s Indigenous arts, politics, and social justice movements. As Publishers Weekly wrote in 2002, Heyday “has clearly staked its claim as a literary institution rooted in the historical and cultural life of California.”
Today a 14-person press helmed by former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, who became publisher of Heyday in 2016, the house publishes 15 – 20 titles per year, including the immensely popular nature guides of John Muir Laws, the bestselling field atlases of Obi Kaufmann, and authors who run the gamut from poet-professor Deborah A. Miranda to environmental reporter and Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia to 11-time Grammy Award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt—all of whom feature in the press’s anniversary anthology.
“Our four areas of focus—our ‘pillars,’ as we call them—are nature, history and culture, social justice, and Native California,” says General Manager and Editorial Director Gayle Wattawa in a 2021 interview with Literary Hub. “Beyond that it’s always hard to articulate a sensibility—we know it when we see it—but we look for projects that are rooted in both place and social justice, explore new ideas, contribute meaningfully to the culture, have depth and authority, cross-pollinate between subjects, express a literary sensibility, and err on the side of playfulness.”
Heyday at Fifty, edited by longtime managing editor Emmerich Anklam, showcases this distinctive sensibility that has animated the publishing house since its founding, with excerpts curated from such house writers as National Book Award finalist Susan Straight, distinguished sansei author David Mas Masumoto, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley, organized around Heyday’s four pillars: Honoring Nature, Fighting Injustice, Celebrating Native California Cultural Renewal, and Making History.
To celebrate the press’ fiftieth anniversary, Heyday is organizing a series of celebrations and programming throughout the year, including publishing panels at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (Los Angeles, April 20 – 21), the Bay Area Book Festival (Berkeley, June 1 – 2), and Litquake (San Francisco, October 10 – 26). Anniversary celebrations will culminate with the 18th Annual Heyday Harvest, the press’ yearly fundraiser (October). This year’s Harvest will mark the first return to an in-person program since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Percival Everett will be awarded the Heyday History Award for his publication of James: A Novel and Malcolm Margolin, the press’ 83-year-old founder, will be honored with Heyday’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“The depth of the community that has formed around Heyday is my deepest pride and greatest accomplishment,” Margolin told Publishers Weekly in 2014, and Heyday looks forward to sharing this milestone with that community this anniversary year.
Praise for Heyday
“Confluence is a big part of California, and Heyday has been the glorious secret center of confluence for many years, the place where art and literature and Native lore and environmental history all converge.”
—REBECCA SOLNIT, writer, historian, and activist
“Many of the books Heyday publishes prompt us to think more deeply about how we relate to the natural world, the intersections to social justice, and the history of land—recognizing that the history of land is inseparable from the history of our society.”
—ROSANNA XIA, author of California Against the Sea
“Heyday is the dynamic cultural storehouse of contemporary California Indigenous literature. We need a press like Heyday in every geographical section of the Americas!”
—JOY HARJO, poet, musician, writer, and performer
“Heyday exemplifies why small presses matter to American culture because the books it published, the conversations they fostered, changed the broader culture—not just in California but across North America.”
—DANA GIOIA, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
“One of America’s most important independent publishers—I’ve been buying their beautifully designed, thought provoking, irresistible publications for years.”
—SUSAN D. ANDERSON, history curator and program manager at the California African American Museum
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com.
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Debuts August 2024 — Bird of Four Hundred Voices
Mexican Folk Music Takes Center Stage in New Memoir
Los Cenzontles founder Eugene Rodriguez shares his story of cultivating young Chicano musicians by connecting them to their cultural roots.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Los Cenzontles — the prolific Mexican folk band and nonprofit — was founded by Eugene Rodriguez in the late 1980s on the conviction that culture helps us understand the fullness of who we are. Acutely aware of the lack of Mexican American representation in mainstream US media, Rodriguez created Los Cenzontles as a pathway for young Chicano musicians to connect with their roots through song. In Bird of Four Hundred Voices: A Mexican American Memoir of Music and Belonging, Rodriguez details how his upbringing propelled him to cultivate this one-of-a-kind ensemble, who today are collaborators to some of the leading Latino recording artists of all time.
“In a society that tries, in countless ways, to convince us to devalue ourselves, the cultural arts can help our children build resourcefulness and resilience that can protect their sense of self,” says Rodriguez, who began giving classical guitar lessons to kids living at a blighted edge of the East Bay while studying music in San Francisco. His deep repertoire drew from the vibrant tapestry of Mexico’s traditional genres: mariachi, rancheras, huapangos — all of which became the founding inspiration for Rodriguez’s eventual nonprofit offering musical education to the children of the Mexican diaspora living in working class communities of the Bay Area.
Starting from humble origins and a lean staff, Los Cenzontles (the mockingbirds) has enjoyed meteoric success by both “honor[ing] and upend[ing] traditional Mexican music,” and creating “something completely new, and distinctly American,” as the the New York Times wrote. Today the group is a transformative cultural institution that has recorded a Grammy-nominated album, offered rousing performances on both sides of the border, collaborated with the likes of Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, and co-starred in a Linda Ronstadt documentary (Linda and the Mockingbirds). By esteeming students as collaborators, Los Cenzontles has not only transformed the lives of the young people who have picked up a guitar under its imprimatur but it has also established for itself a lasting influence in some of the most celebrated echelons of Mexican folk music.
“Eugene teaches children the right music for the right reasons, not necessarily to be performers but to explore their own joys and sorrows” says Linda Ronstadt, whose mariachi album Canciones de mi Padre went double platinum in the US market, “I wish I had studied with him when I was growing up. Read this beautifully written book about culture, identity and resilience, and you will know why.”
Advance Praise for Bird of Four Hundred Voices
“An inspiring tale of the transformative power of culture.”
—LINDA RONSTADT
“A son of so much: activism, history, art, pride, California, Mexico, the world. Each sentence, paragraph, page and story is a fandango for the soul.”
—GUSTAVO ARELLANO, L.A. Times columnist and author of Taco USA
“For many years, I have been hearing of some kind of magic that Eugene Rodriguez was creating across San Francisco Bay, with an institute of serious fun. In hardscrabble San Pablo, California, Eugene Rodriguez records his life’s work first as student then as teacher: He has taught young men and women and children to dance and sing with the dead.”
—RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, author of Hunger of Memory
“Firmly rooted in tradition and activism, Eugene Rodriguez’s Bird of Four Hundred Voices brings us the extraordinary trajectory of one of the most renowned traditional Mexican dance advocates and attests to the tremendous power of cultural affirmation and celebration.”
—NORMA E. CANTÚ, author of Dancing Across Borders
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
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Eugene Rodriguez is founder and executive director of Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, a nonprofit based in San Pablo, California. He formed Los Cenzontles in 1989. Rodriguez has produced over thirty albums and numerous films for Los Cenzontles, and he has collaborated with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Los Lobos, Lalo Guerrero, Ry Cooder, the Chieftains, and Taj Mahal. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. He is also the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including from the California Arts Council and United States Artists. He lives in Richmond, California.
Debuts May 2024 — Unnatural Habitat
A Vivid, Novel Portrait of the Bizarre Ecosystem of Los Angeles Calls on Angelenos to Support the City’s Wildlife
Craig Stanford reveals the interconnectedness of LA’s unlikely mosaic of plant and animal life, both native and introduced, and the actions that we can take now to support its abundant biodiversity.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Los Angeles boasts one of the busiest biospheres in the world. The daily jostling of millions of people across a city brimming with wildlife, both native and new to the region, make the LA basin one giant jigsaw puzzle of an ecosystem. While some species flourish and others flounder, the rapid sprawl of human settlement raises pressing questions about how to support the immense and ever-shifting biodiversity of the metropolis and surrounding lands. In Unnatural Habitat: The Native and Exotic Wildlife of Los Angeles biologist and anthropologist Craig Stanford explores how flora and fauna from the world-over converge and survive in this unfurling urban landscape.
“The natural Southern California landscape is not the one in which most suburban Angelenos live,” says Stanford, “Most of us inhabit a verdant but ecologically hollow subtropical system”—one in which natural interactions that typically compose a healthy ecosystem are largely gone. A verdant, Edenic tableau of nonnative palm trees, parrots, and peacocks parade across an engineered oasis that defies the region’s naturally semi-arid climate. Species that formerly thrived in these environs—indigenous mountain lions, monarch butterflies, and the once-mighty oak—dwindle in number as introduced species—feral cats, rats, and fountain grasses—proliferate and prosper.
Blending natural and human history with a scientist’s insight, Stanford—“a talented and fluid writer as well as an accomplished researcher” (writes the Wall Street Journal)—reveals the unlikely mosaic that has emerged in Los Angeles, and how we can begin to stack the deck back in favor of diverse, robust, and sustainable habitats. From the sky island ecosystems atop LA’s majestic mountain ranges to the bucolic green lawns of suburbia, he interrogates the interconnectedness of place, people, and wildlife in Southern California, always with an eye to the question: What sort of future do we wish to build? And how do we create that future, starting in our own backyard?
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Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
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Craig Stanford is a biologist and anthropologist at the University of Southern California. He is known for his long-term field research on wild chimpanzees in East Africa, and for his many field studies of highly endangered turtles and tortoises in Asia and Latin America. He has published nearly twenty books and hundreds of articles about animal behavior, human origins, and environmental issues. Stanford is a long-time resident of the Pasadena area in Southern California.
Debuts April 2024 — What Kind of Bird Can't Fly
A Leader in the Movement for Prisoners’ Rights Shares Telling Insights in New Memoir Centering Solidarity and Resistance
Dorsey Nunn shares his meteoric origin story, tracing how his time spent in prison became a catalyst for the nationwide movement he nurtured to restore dignity and justice to the currently and formerly incarcerated.
“Whoever wants to assuage their doubts that radical change is possible—from the level of the individual to that of law, culture, and society—should make time to read Dorsey Nunn’s extraordinary memoir. Follow him and those with whom he makes community as they do the formidable work of transforming themselves, while fashioning a new world out of their tears and laughter where all—including those banished to prisons—are equally welcome.”
—ANGELA DAVIS, political activist and author of Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy, and Freedom is a Constant Struggle
BERKELEY, CALIF. — After serving over a decade in the California state prison system, Dorsey Nunn emerged fueled by the fight for reform and redress. Empowered by mentors both inside and outside the prison walls, Nunn poured his considerable energies and insights into organizing system-impacted people for sweeping change. As a cofounder of All of Us or None, a nationwide civil and human rights organization, Nunn has successfully fought to raise awareness around involuntary servitude behind bars, strengthen families during and after incarceration, and reduce employment and voting barriers for reentering people. What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection is his remarkable story.
“Like just about everyone I grew up with, I graduated from street thug to prisoner just in time to experience one of the most violent decades in California prison history,” says Nunn, “But this isn’t a prison memoir. And it’s not a personal redemption story, though I’ve done alright on that front. This book is about camaraderie, commitment, and grassroots organizing.”
Written with former LA Times reporter Lee Romney, What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly follows Nunn’s story from his upbringing in East Menlo Park through lockdown in San Quentin to the purpose he found in the decades following his release. Detailing along the way the structures of oppression and sources of inspiration from which Nunn would derive his revolutionary political outlook, this memoir underscores the urgency of restoring and fortifying the civil rights of the currently and formerly imprisoned, from humane living conditions and fair pay inside to access to the presumption of rehabilitation upon completion of a sentence. Influenced by philosophies of the Black power tradition and informed by his own firsthand experiences, Nunn chronicles the traumas and triumphs of his life’s work uplifting the voices of those who have been dispossessed by the criminal legal system, including the campaign to shift public consciousness during the high watermark of the U.S.’ “tough-on-crime” policy era. Anchored throughout is Nunn’s commitment to combat systemic racism and to empower every human being coming out of cages to become the architects of their own liberation.
“The vital grassroots, movement-building work to which Dorsey has dedicated his life has touched and changed countless lives,” writes Michelle Alexander in her foreword to the book, “and demonstrated the brilliance, creativity, and resilience of the very people that our nation has treated as disposable.”
“Dorsey Nunn is one of the grand love warriors and freedom fighters of his generation!
Don’t miss his powerful and poignant story of tragedy and triumph!”
—CORNEL WEST, philosopher and author of Race Matters and Hope on a Tightrope: Words & Wisdom
Advance Praise for What Kind of Bird Can't Fly
“Dorsey Nunn’s memoir is well-written, compelling, moving and honest. It is a story about Dorsey, but because Dorsey knows more deeply than most that nothing good we do is done alone, it is also an ode to so many others who have walked this path with him all these years. While it is a book about the devastation wrought by one of the most death-making institutions in our nation, it has far more heroes in it than villains, and far more hope than despair.”
—DANIELLE SERED, founder and director of Common Justice, author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
“Raw, riveting, and revealing sums up What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly. It is a front row seat to the author’s transformational journey through pain, anger, and hopelessness to emerge with an iron clad resolve to love and advocate for those who society considers the least. While his approach may seem raw, brutal, or even vulgar, Dorsey cajoles the reader, as he does those who come in contact with him, to understand the birthing environment that leads a person towards incarceration, and to take a deeper look at our carceral system while recognizing the humanity of those trapped in its vicious grips.”
—DESMOND MEADE, Executive Director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
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Dorsey Nunn began advocating for the rights of California prisoners and their families while incarcerated. As codirector of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), in 2003 he cofounded All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working on their own behalf to secure their civil and human rights. AOUON is now the policy and advocacy arm of LSPC, which Nunn has led as executive director since 2011. Collective victories include ending indefinite solitary confinement in California, expanding access to housing and employment for formerly incarcerated people, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation.
Lee Romney spent twenty-three years as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she developed expertise in criminal justice and mental health. She is currently collaborating with a former public defender on the podcast November in My Soul.
Debuts March 2024 — The Poet and the Silk Girl
New Memoir Unveils One Japanese American Family’s Life Inside a WWII-era American Concentration Camp
The Poet and the Silk Girl follows the harrowing journey of the Ina family through wartime race-based incarceration and traces the echoes of trauma across the generations.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — In 1942 San Francisco, photojournalist Dorothea Lange captured an era-defining portrait: A Japanese American woman cranes her neck, concern etched across her brow, as she waits in line to register her family for forced removal. She was one of the 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry that the U.S. forcibly displaced and incarcerated after declaring war on Japan in WWII. The woman at the center of this evocative image was Shizuko Ina, and The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest is the story of the unimaginable future that came next for her and her family.
In this moving memoir, author Satsuki Ina—who was born to Shizuko in the Tule Lake Segregation Center—recovers the story of how her parents survived and resisted their incarceration in U.S. concentration camps. Drawing from diary entries, heart-wrenching haiku, censored letters, government documents, and clandestine messages, Ina shares the eyewitness dispatches of Shizuko and her newlywed husband Itaru. Their words, interwoven with the ravel of war and Ina’s own retrospective reflection, afford an intimate view into the experiences of those whose lives were upended, by reason of race alone, by Executive Order 9066—a presidential edict that dispossessed an entire generation of Japanese people, including U.S. citizens, of their homes and livelihoods.
The Inas’ story takes us from San Francisco’s Japantown—rendered desolate by forced removal—to the cramped quarters of Tanforan. It captures a rare glimpse of camp life at Topaz, a hotbed of organized protest, where the Inas’ second child was born, and where Itaru took a principled stance as a “No-No” when pressed under duress to pledge his loyalty to the U.S. government. It takes us to an “enemy alien” prison camp in Bismarck where the fate of the family hangs in precarious balance as the war draws to a close. And it takes us to now, as Satsuki Ina, a psychotherapist and activist, connects her family’s ordeal to paralleling atrocities today—from anti-Asian hate crimes to the incarcerated migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
With dauntless conviction, Ina’s multivocal memoir serves as a powerful testament to the traumatic legacies of state-sanctioned race-baiting and fear-mongering. It also reminds us of the temerity of the human spirit and the fortifying succor of compassionate witnessing.
Advance Praise for The Poet and the Silk Girl
“This is a seminal, beautifully rendered intergenerational narrative of a courageous young couple who spoke truth to power that re-centers the Japanese American incarceration story as civil rights activism.”
—BARBARA TAKEI, coauthor of Tule Lake Revisited
“Satsuki Ina’s The Poet and the Silk Girl is a revelation. Beautifully woven together by her mother’s diary and her father’s haiku—through which they are both still speaking—it is memoir as healing, as self- and soul-determination, and as vigilance, the keeping vigil over past lives that are still becoming.”
—BRANDON SHIMODA, author of The Grave on the Wall
“Tracing the lives of her newlywed US-born Japanese American parents through no fewer than six different camps and the births of two children, Ina weaves archival and family ephemera together, heightened by her insights as a psychotherapist. The Poet and the Silk Girl is storytelling as activism at its finest.”
—DEBORAH A. MIRANDA, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
“The internal landscape of injustice is made heartbreakingly visible in this exquisitely written and passionate memoir. It reminds us of what we might otherwise forget: that injustice is an intimately lived experience, endured day to day and hour to hour, and full of complexities roiling deep in the heart and mind.”
—DAVID GUTERSON, author of Snow Falling on Cedars
“Satsuki Ina’s family-rooted memoir is a richly documented and reasoned investigation of how the US government’s unjust World War II oppression of some 125,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry set in motion an intergenerational transmission of trauma that now urgently needs to be addressed and redressed.”
—ART HANSEN, author of Barbed Voices and A Nikkei Harvest
“The Poet and the Silk Girl is a ground-breaking contribution to the literature on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. This combination of first-hand accounts from the past with Ina’s personal experiences and expertise brings incarceration history to life in unique, powerful, and insightful ways.”
—DONNA NAGATA, author of Legacy of Injustice
“Born in an American concentration camp, Satsuki Ina weaves her own experiences into conversation with her parents’ wartime letters and father’s haiku poetry from behind barbed wire to show how family history is a part of the very fabric of the struggle to belong in America. A beautifully-crafted memoir and community history that brilliantly reveals how past, present, and future are interlinked.”
—DUNCAN RYUKEN WILLIAMS, author of The Other Side of Zen
“A profound and moving testimony to intergenerational trauma and resistance.”
—TONY PLATT, author of Beyond These Walls
“A tremendous, and tremendously moving, account of injustice, resistance, and resilience. The indignities endured by Satsuki Ina’s parents were beyond healing, but in telling their story unflinchingly and drawing its lessons for our time, she herself reaches impressive closure.”
—FREDERICK CREWS, author of Freud: The Making of an Illusion
“This incredibly poignant account reveals how a daughter uncovered why her parents went from buying war bonds and voting in every election to renouncing their citizenship during the World War II mass incarceration. In writing this family memoir, Satsuki Ina pays tribute to her parents’ courageous protest and love of family while also showing how their suffering inspired her support of recent Central American migrants experiencing indefinite detention and family separation.”
—ALICE YANG, Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories
“A powerful quilt work of memory, The Poet and the Silk Girl sutures the traumatic wounds of Japanese American incarceration with care for the past and struggle for the future.”
—ANDREW LEONG, Assistant Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
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Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist specializing in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim not only their voice but also their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism has included co-founding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now! and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Debuts April 2024 — The Forgetters
An Enchanting Story Cycle Traces Tales of California Indians from the Missions to Modern-Day, Recalling Timeless Truths
Award-winning author and long-time tribal chairman Greg Sarris debuts an incantatory new fiction collection rooted in the ancestral homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo.
“Greg Sarris once again tells us a story filled with stories that lift the spirits in troubled times. A wonderful read that transports us to a realm of beauty, kindness, and love of life.”
—ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Celebrated storyteller and tribal leader Greg Sarris offers a contemplative and enchanting story cycle in The Forgetters (April 2024), a collection that blends into an unsuspected harmony shimmering dream trance with waking life, human and animal forms, and eras bygone and still-to-come. Borrowing from the cadence of Native American creation stories and the quiet enchantment of magical realism, these tales combine to reveal the foibles and folly that beset us and the lessons that recall us to ourselves and the world.
The Forgetters excavates multilayered tales of California’s Indigenous exiles, camp workers, shapeshifters, and medicine people as they interweave with the paths of settlers, migrants, and other wayfarers across the arc of recent centuries and beyond. Narrated by the enigmatic crow sisters, Question Woman and Answer Woman (who first appeared in Sarris’ 2017 How a Mountain Was Made—lauded as “a stunning array of […] contemporary allegories” by the Los Angeles Review of Books), this collection returns to Sonoma Mountain and traverses the homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo. Rooted in today’s Marin and Sonoma counties, these transporting tales glimmer with an intimate connection to place and past—from ancient mythic time when all the animals were people to a speculative future when the people return as environmental refugees to the mountain from which they came.
“Greg Sarris once again tells us a story filled with stories that lift the spirits in troubled times,” says Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “[The Forgetters is] a wonderful read that transports us to a realm of beauty, kindness, and love of life.”
This collection of tales, interwoven with the memorable banter of the crow sisters, chimes a moral chord that reminds us why we need each other, that all our stories are connected, and that the words we remember become the words we live by—and to forget them is to risk peril. Heralded as a “fine storyteller” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Sarris’ latest is a triumph of craft that showcases the enduring power of story to make and remake our world anew.
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Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
Isabella Nugent
Publicist, Page One Media
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Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and his first term as board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His political activism in the 1990s culminated in the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, which he co-authored, providing federal recognition and associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Pomo Native Americans of California, including the restoration of land to the Tribe, which had been without a homeland for over fifty years.
Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has taught English, American and American Indian Literature, and Creative Writing at UCLA, Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Sonoma State University. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sarris is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), Kirkus Book Prize finalist Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which was adapted to an HBO film, co-produced by Sarris with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and his most recent play, Citizen (2023) debuted at San Francisco’s Word for Word theater and was lauded as a “lush […] linguistic feast” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Debuts October 2023 — Nocturnalia
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nocturnalia Explores the Enchanting World of Nighttime Wildlife in the American West
This fall, unleash your inner nighttime explorer with this fascinating guidebook to the creatures that thrive after dark.
BERKELEY, CALIF.— While darkness may typically be seen as cause for concern for us humans, naturalist Charles Hood and bat biologist José Gabriel Martínez-Fonseca are inviting readers to embrace the night and discover the nocturnal universe that stirs to life after we fall asleep. Featuring over 100 stunning photographs from California and the American Southwest, Nocturnalia: Nature in the Western Night takes readers on an environmental romp through the wonders of the Wild West.
On October 31, 2023, dive into the world of nighttime plants, owls, bats, and the celestial patterns that regulate our after-dark kingdom. From the bloom of the nightshade blossoms to the gleaming fox eyes, to the tiny sparrows guiding themselves with the stars, Hood and Martínez-Fonseca offer practical tips for budding nighttime naturalists. Citizen scientists of all stripes will expand their understanding of the life on earth we can’t always see.
“To state the obvious: nature does not stop when the sun sets,” write Hood and Martínez-Fonseca, “In this book, we want to celebrate the other half of life, the unknown half, the surprising half, and what at times might be the scary half.”
Nocturnalia is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the wonders of the natural world. Hood and Martínez-Fonseca’s deep knowledge and passion for these nocturnal creatures are evident on every page, making this book an engaging and informative read for both nature enthusiasts and casual readers alike. Showcasing the flora and fauna that thrive under the cover of darkness—from the nocturnal flowers that unfurl under moonshine to the creatures that go bump in the night—Hood and Martínez-Fonseca take readers on a thrilling journey through the wonders of nature after nightfall.
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Kalie Caetano
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Charles Hood is a poet and naturalist who lives in the Mojave Desert. His previous books with Heyday include Wild Sonoma: Exploring Nature in Wine Country and A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature. Always ready for the next excursion, he owns three bat detectors, nine headlamps and flashlights, and a hardcopy world atlas.
José Gabriel Martínez-Fonseca divides his time between Nicaragua and Arizona, where he recently completed a PhD in bat ecology. He owns almost as many headlamps and cameras as Charles does and has contributed images to wildlife publications worldwide. He is also very adroit at catching bats and tarantulas, among other creatures. Martínez-Fonseca is the coauthor, along with Charles Hood and Erin Westeen, of Sea Turtles to Sidewinders: A Guide to the Most Fascinating Reptiles and Amphibians of the West.
Debuts October 2023 — The Deserts of California
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Beloved Artist-Adventurer Obi Kaufmann Takes Readers on a Journey into the Heart of the Desert
The San Francisco Chronicle #1 bestselling author of the canonical California Field Atlas returns with an epic, forward-looking exploration of the state’s arid eastern regions.
BERKELEY, CALIF.—With climate breakdown heating up and desertification looming over the horizon, Obi Kaufmann leads curious adventurers on a voyage into the sage-and-ocher landscapes of the American West’s world-famous desert regions this fall in his revelatory and sumptuously illustrated new volume The Deserts of California: A California Field Atlas. As philosophical as it is geophysical, this journey blends science and art in Kaufmann’s signature style to throw into relief ecological insights greater than either might yield alone. Through expressionistic mapmaking, wildlife renderings, and geographic conservation guides, Kaufmann explores the marvels of and threats to these resilient yet sensitive ecosystems.
Featuring over 400 watercolors, this epic tome blazes a trail through the sun-scorched deserts of Sonora, Mojave, Colorado, and Great Basin and the many micro-ecosystems dwelling therein, from the arid to the alpine. With a naturalist’s devotion, Kaufmann articulates through paintbrush and pen stroke the beauty and temerity of desert life. The iconic flora of palm trees, sagebrush, and creosote and the hardy wildlife that scurry, slither, saunter, and soar across these stark and sublime tableaus take center stage in these pages. Written from an anticipatory perspective, Kaufmann meditates on the future of these rugged lands, vulnerable to a variety of injuries from urban incursion. From the gentrivacation of Joshua Tree National Park to the extraction of precious groundwater to the impacts of sound, light, garbage, and plastic pollution, Kaufmann explores what stories should be told about our rights, our responsibilities, and our relationship to the more-than-human world with wonder, sobriety, and hope.
“The Deserts of California presumes that hope, like healing, relies on time,” writes Kaufmann. “If there is time, there is hope. Although every desert habitat type is threatened, very little of it is yet extinct. Despite the complexity of the threat, everywhere there is precedent for resurgence.”
Of a piece with his best-selling books The Forests of California (2020) and The Coasts of California (2022), The Deserts of California (October 2023) rounds out Kaufmann’s expansive California Lands Trilogy. Individually and collectively, these volumes set out to transform entrenched colonialist attitudes toward the American West, and transform our concept of nature from a resource for extraction to a shared and cherished inheritance.
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Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle bestseller), The State of Water (2019), The Forests of California (2020), and The Coasts of California (2022), all published by Heyday. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings at his handle @coyotethunder on Instagram. His speaking tour dates are available at californiafieldatlas.com, and his essays are posted at coyoteandthunder.com.
A Note from Obi on the California Lands Trilogy and Other Works
With the publication of The Deserts of California, my journey into the living heart of California, a journey that has given rise to what is rather informally called the California lands trilogy— exploring the forests, coasts, and now deserts of the West Coast—becomes a completed vision.
I set out on this journey with my first book, The California Field Atlas, in 2015. My intention was to explore the grand systems of earth, air, fire, and water, and to describe the context of these systems across the body of California’s world-famous landscape. To get to what is the California Field Atlas series I had to dig deep into the water infrastructure of the state and understand the storage, usage, and conveyance of California’s most precious resource. I did that in my second book, The State of Water (2019). I was shocked to find that my third book, The Forests of California (2020), was as much a descriptive journey into California’s evolutionary past as much as it was a catalog of the state’s arboreal ecology. Expanding on this idea of temporality, my fourth book, The Coasts of California (2022), was an ecological snapshot of the contemporary conditions that dynamically influence California right now, as the many bottlenecks of the twenty-first century seem to narrow and become more acute and threatening.
The Deserts of California (2023) is an exploration of the future, where the big questions of what saving nature actually means are brought into focus. California’s deserts are paradoxically as fragile as they are resilient, and they represent the greatest challenge humanity faces in the emerging Anthropocene. Although it may be that in the desert we are faced with the terrifying dilemma of having to sacrifice nature in order to save it, if we flip the script and approach the future from a different angle, where humanity and nature aren’t separate concepts, a hopeful vision emerges. Based on a reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world, this vision begins with a nuanced understanding of biodiversity and ecology, where ancient wisdom and scientific innovation conjoin to not only paint a more beautiful future, but also tell a better story about the determining role our species has in making that future a reality.
Debuts September 2023 — California Against the Sea
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pulitzer Finalist Sounds the Alarm and Offers A Way Forward for Confronting Sea Level Rise
In a new book, celebrated environmental journalist Rosanna Xia reveals what we stand to lose as the world’s oceans expand—unless we can begin to imagine more climate-wise futures.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Wherever land meets sea, global warming is wreaking havoc. As the ocean absorbs heat generated by human industry, its waters swell into higher-than-high tides and city-leveling storms. Venice sinks, Louisiana shrinks, Indonesians flee their seaside capital, and North Carolina’s beaches are disappearing like a time lapse with no end. For the last hundred years, California’s 1,200-mile Pacific coastline has enjoyed relative calm due to a rare confluence of atmospheric factors. But shifting tides exacerbated by climate change are bringing this serene century to a screeching close. In California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia dives deep into the stakes, stopgaps, internecine struggles, and potential paths forward for the 27 million people who call this coastline home.
Voyaging across the state, Xia—a veteran coastal reporter for the Los Angeles Times—pulls the curtain back on the trepidations of scientists, the tenacity of activists, and the pitched battles intensifying in more than 20 communities dotting the California coast as they grapple with rising waters. These waters, which could surge by as much as 6–7 feet by century’s end, threaten to push the shore inland by a measure of multiple football fields. This anticipated surge imperils tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of human settlement—seawalls notwithstanding—to say nothing of the risk posed to human and non-human life. The scale of this prospective destruction and displacement could rival the impacts of the state’s raging wildfires.
The challenge, Xia says, is How do we get more people to care? How do we convey urgency? How do we tell them it’s now, not later? Through graceful, in-depth reporting Xia addresses herself to these questions, exploring how development and other vested interests have trumped science, how low-income communities bare the disproportionate brunt of environmental catastrophe (and are poised to do so again), how an attitude of human supremacy has hobbled our imaginations to envision what the coast could be, and how we may yet forestall impending devastation if we can find the way to embrace our collective capacity for change—in time.
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Advance Praise for California Against the Sea
“Just as the coast defines the liminal world between land and sea, so too does Rosanna Xia’s remarkable book exist in the overlap between development and erosion, between geological forces and human desire, between our ambitious past and our tenuous future. It’s viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written—a must-read for our uncertain times.”
—ED YONG, author of An Immense World
“This book should be required reading for Californians—and all Americans. The fate of one state’s rising coastline, and what it portends for our future, will affect us all. Exquisite and wrenching, Rosanna Xia has written an essential book that shows us what we stand to lose.”
—LIZZIE JOHNSON, author of Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire
“Fans of Xia’s work for the L.A. Times will recognize her virtuosic blend of propulsive boots-on-the-ground storytelling, explanatory reporting, and genuine curiosity and love for place. A profound and timely exploration of humanity’s various and shifting relationships to coastlines and the forces that shape them by one of the great environmental reporters working today.”
—LISA WELLS, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“Xia’s prophetic and perceptive book reveals a California coastline denied by centuries of settlers more intent on dreaming than facing the unsteady reality of the living ocean’s edge. California Against the Sea is the invitation we need today to enter a future where we learn to work with nature instead of against it. Xia’s message should be heeded everywhere ocean meets land.”
—MEERA SUBRAMANIAN author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka
“In the midst of the climate crisis, can the people of California treat the rising Pacific Ocean as something other than an adversary? In California Against the Sea, Rosanna Xia argues persuasively that such a transformation is not only possible but already underway, inspired by lessons from deep history and the recent past. Rigorously reported and beautifully written, this book is a crucial guide to the future.”
—MICHELLE NIJHUIS, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
“Xia’s California Against the Sea deftly charts the past, present and future of California’s changing coastlines in order to retrieve hope for more sustainable futures from headlines of environmental loss. This lucid account shows that sea-level rise is less an intractable problem than an urgent invitation to rethink our relationships with oceans and with one another. A beautiful, revelatory and prescient book.”
—LUCAS BESSIRE, author of Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
“Rosanna Xia’s ability to move effortlessly between the journalist’s voice, the historian’s voice, and even the poet’s voice makes her story of our climate precarity more than an account of evidence and circumstance. The book is rife with humanity, nuanced and powerful because of it.”
—OBI KAUFMANN, author of The Coasts of California
Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her work spans feature writing to investigative reporting and engages themes of climate and social justice. Xia’s reporting has uncovered the dumping of toxic DDT waste off the Los Angeles coast; set the record straight on the seizure of Bruce’s Beach from its Black proprietors (prompting an unprecedented reparative land return in 2022); explored the impacts of coastal gentrification; and articulated the dangers posed to shorelines by pollution and heating oceans. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting on sea level rise, which inspired the work that culminated in California Against the Sea. Her writing has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
A Q&A with Rosanna Xia
As you travel the California coast, what does connecting with the ocean mean to you?
ROSANNA XIA: Connecting with the ocean has meant connecting more deeply with the land. The two are inseparable when it comes to understanding the past, present, and future of our coast. I’ve learned to see land as a tide that also rises and falls. I’ve come to appreciate our wave-battered cliffs that feed the sand on our beaches, and to cherish our half-submerged marshlands and all the vanishing, in-between spaces that once moved with the rhythms of the sea. The ocean is constantly shaping and sanding and nurturing our shoreline, and I find myself admiring these subtleties every time I’m out by the water.
You explore the possibility of having a more reciprocal relationship with nature as a direction toward more climate-wise action. What does this reciprocity entail?
ROSANNA XIA: I’ve been reflecting a lot on all the knowledge that we’ve collectively lost in the process of hardening our shoreline and building the California coast as we know it. We’ve walled off the sea, buried critical wetlands, and paved over ancient dune systems that once buffered our beaches. We’ve ignored Indigenous ways of listening to the water and sacrificed (and further disempowered) historically vulnerable communities for the sake of industrialization.
There exists more than one way to live with rising water, but our current notion of what the coast should be has overshadowed the possibilities of what could be. We keep building walls to protect what we know, but is this really the only way forward?
As a writer confronting climate change, how do you navigate the emotional impacts of seeing the impacts occur, and knowing they will get worse?
ROSANNA XIA: For years, I struggled with how to balance the “right” amount of hope and despair whenever I wrote about climate change. Too much hope might diminish the urgency. Too little can lead to defeatism and inaction.
But the longer I’ve reported on climate change, the more I’ve discovered it is not the feeling of hope, but responsibility, that grounds me. We have a responsibility to take better care of the air that we breathe, the land that we rely on, the ocean that has quietly absorbed the brunt of our emissions. This duty to clean up the messes of our past, and to reconsider how we want to live in the future, is now what guides my reporting and writing.
