Subtexts Readings by José Skinner, Demetria Martinez, and Ana Castillo

The personal is political: Readings around town

The Tombstone Race (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent collection of gritty and tonally rich short stories set in New Mexico by José Skinner, a writer who, as a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and former director of the MFA writing program at the University of Texas-Pan American, is steeped in academia, but also walked the political talk as an organizer against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua in the 1980s. He talks about his work and signs copies of The Tombstone Race at Allá Books (102 W. San Francisco St., 505-988-5416) on Friday, July 8, at 5 p.m.

Another writer and controversial 1980s activist, Demetria Martinez, reads in the Great Hall at St. John’s College (1160 Camino de Cruz Blanca) on Tuesday, July 12, at 7 p.m., for the Bread Loaf School of English, a program of Middlebury College that is held annually in Santa Fe. In 1988, Martinez was tried for conspiracy against the U.S. government in connection with allegedly smuggling Salvadoran refugees into the country while she was working as a religion reporter covering the sanctuary movement. She was acquitted on First Amendment grounds, and her novel, Mother Tongue (Bilingual Press, 1994), won a Western States Book Award for fiction. For more information, call 505-984-6000.

One of today’s foremost Chicana authors, Ana Castillo, reads from and signs copies of her new memoir, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (The Feminist Press at CUNY) at Collected Works Bookstore (202 Galisteo St., 505-988-4226) on Wednesday, July 13, at 6 p.m. In Black Dove, Castillo recalls her son’s path to incarceration and what it means to be a single, Latina mother and a feminist raising a child in a society that identifies and targets him as a criminal from a young age. —