Join the Center of the American West for our last event of the 2024-25 academic year! Co-sponsored with the Women & Gender Studies Program, this event will feature the digital humanities works of Drs. John-Michael Rivera and Julie Carr of CU Boulder, and Dr. Lucas Bessire of the Colorado School of Mines. This event is FREE and open to the public, with a reception with the presenters to be held after the event.

About the Presenters:

John-Michael Rivera is a professor of English and humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder. His first book, The Emergence of Mexican America, won the Thomas J. Lyon Best Book Award. His second book, UNDOCUMENTS, recently won the Kayden Award and Pope Award. He has edited, introduced and translated two books for the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and has published widely in scholarship, essays, memoir, creative nonfiction, photo/poetics, and poetry. He is currently working on two photo/poetics projects—the first is an essay on mass shootings, cameras and American populism called “Head Shots”; and a book entitled, Billy the Kid and the Exposure of the Authentic West.

Julie Carr is the author of 11 books of poetry and prose, including Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein; Real Life: An Installation; Objects from a Borrowed Confession; and Someone Shot my Book. Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence; RAG; and Think Tank. Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory was published by Commune Editions in 2018. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populist, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow. She has collaborated with dance artists K.J. Holmes and Gesel Mason. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver. 

Lucas Bessire is an American writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. Based on field travels that have taken him from the Gran Chaco to the Arctic and back to the High Plains, his writing explores the lived experience of contemporary changes and seeks ways to communicate his findings to wider publics. A fifth-generation Kansan, Lucas graduated summa cum laude from Kansas State University before earning his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from New York University. He has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a fellow of both Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Alongside various films, essays and articles, he is the author of the ethnography Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press 2014), which won three prizes, including the Gregory Bateson Prize. His most recent book Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press 2021), won seven awards, including the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and was named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction. Among other honors, Lucas is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. Currently, he is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines, where he is completing a book on environmental change, masculinity, and realism on the High Plains.