Heyday

Essays and short stories from a celebrated Cupeño/Cahuilla journalist.

"Johnson is by turns tender and hilarious—as ever. This book is a welcome addition to his loving history of the world as he knows it." —Susan Straight, author of Sacrament

In this moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. From the noir-tinged mystery of "Unholy Wine" to the gripping intensity of "Tukwut," Johnson effortlessly switches genre and perspective, vividly evoking people and places that are fictional but profoundly true to life. Johnson’s nonfiction is equally revelatory in its exploration of connections between past and present. Whether examining his own conflicted feelings toward the missions as a source of both cultural damage and identity or sharing advice on cooking for eight dozen cowboys and -girls, Johnson plumbs the comedy, catastrophe, and beauty of his life on the Pala Reservation to thunderous effect.

From a celebrated Native journalist, an electrifying memoir of travel, love, friendships, and connection across cultures.

Growing up on the Torres Martinez Reservation in Southern California, Terria Smith longed for adventure. She became a journalist, hitting the road and reporting on the rich lives of Native people around the United States. As her hunger for travel grew, so did her understanding of community, and what it means to be a world citizen today. I Love You So Many—named after a favorite expression of her Spanish-speaking relatives—follows Smith from her ancestral homelands to Cuba, Iceland, Guyana, and back again. With exuberant, laugh-out-loud style she tells stories about forging profound friendships, falling in and out of love, and celebrating the determination that carried her through hard and heady times alike. She brings a fresh sensibility to travel writing, building enduring relationships with the people and cultures she visits. For Smith, travel is deeply rooted in Native traditions: It’s about sharing, reciprocity, risk-taking, and the valuable (and sometimes awkward) work of bridging and holding differences. As fun as it is poignant, I Love You So Many is an irresistible tribute to getting out and living a life in full.

A vibrant and holistic grassroots guide to disaster preparedness that builds community resilience.

polycrisis noun /‘pa:.li,krai.sis/
a time of great disagreement, confusion, or suffering caused by many different crises occurring simultaneously and amplifying one another.

How do we live in the age of disaster? In this updated and expanded guide to collective crisis preparedness, Kailea and Kate, organizers and coeditors for the book and magazine publisher Loam, share community-shaped strategies on how to practically navigate the challenges posed by overlapping catastrophes—be they environmental, economic, political, or otherwise. Help is here for our bodies, hearts, minds, and shared homes. By amplifying resources for resilience, the authors underscore preparedness as a constant, communal practice. They offer inspiration from frontline organizers who help their communities prepare for emergencies, demonstrate how to envision probable futures after upheaval, and showcase people-powered projects that nurture collective regeneration. With engaging prompts, concise checklists, and heartfelt advice, Compassion in Crisis helps its readers build and sustain the durable mutual aid networks necessary for rapid response in the face of disaster. This is your invitation into the lifelong work of caring for our Earth and one another as we all find our way through the polycrisis.

Winner, Carter G. Woodson Book Award * Winner, New-York Historical Society Children’s Book Prize * Winner, Social Justice Literature Award * Honor Title, Jane Addams Children’s Book Award * Finalist, 2017 Cybils Awards * Nominee, Georgia Children’s Book Award * Nominee, Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award * Nominee, South Carolina Junior Book Award * A Kirkus Best Book of the Year * An Association of Children's Librarians of Northern California Outstanding Title

Now in paperback: The award-winning story of Fred Korematsu's fight for justice, acclaimed by School Library Journal as "an invaluable profile of a civil rights hero."

The first book in Heyday's Fighting for Justice series and now in paperback, the story of Fred Korematsu's fight against discrimination explores the life of one courageous person who made the United States a fairer place for all Americans, and it encourages all of us to speak up for justice.

Delight in the Sierra Nevada’s diverse avifauna with this long-awaited field guide.

Identify and learn about over two hundred and fifty birds of the Sierra Nevada. From tiniest hummingbirds to condors with nine-foot wingspans; from lower-elevation wrens to the rasping nutcrackers of the High Sierra; from urban House Sparrows to wild water–loving American Dippers, Hansen’s Field Guide to the Birds of the Sierra Nevada showcases artist-naturalist Keith Hansen’s sixteen-year project to illustrate the birds of the Sierra Nevada. Paired with stunningly detailed portraits is text informed by decades of birding experience—prose that while firmly grounded in expertise will nonetheless delight readers with its whimsy, allusion, and affection. Take the Bufflehead: "A diminutive and endearing diving duck," which moves "with spirited abandon." Or the "scrappy and antagonistic" Merlin, "holding dominion over winter skies, tormenting eagles, hawks, and vultures alike." The White-tailed Kite is "angelic in poise, a streamlined bird of unblemished tailoring"; the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher sports a black eye-to-eye brow, imparting a "Frida Kahlo–like stare." This book is the field guide companion to the Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status, and Distribution, also coauthored by Edward C. Beedy and illustrated by Keith Hansen (University of California Press, 2013).

Heyday is proud to present a paperback of the six editorials, brought up to date with an introduction by Davan Maharaj, The Times’s publisher and editor-in-chief, and by Nicholas Goldberg, the paper’s editor of the editorial pages. When read in sequence the arguments gain force and momentum, delivering a formidable and indispensable critique by one of America’s most important newspapers.

Many books have chronicled the experience of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II, when over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were taken from their homes along the West Coast and imprisoned in concentration camps. When they were finally allowed to leave, a new challenge faced them—how do you resume a life so interrupted?

For most, going home meant learning to live in a hostile, racist environment. Some returned to find they had lost their homes and had little choice but to bide their time in transitional housing, including community halls, churches, housing projects, and tent camps. Their employment options were also limited; they often worked as domestics, dishwashers, and field laborers to help support their families. The effects of these experiences reverberate to this day, and Making Home from War reaches into the past, melds together what was once hidden, and tells the often neglected or hushed story of what happened after the war.

With honesty and an eye for detail, Making Home from War is the long-awaited sequel to the award-winning From Our Side of the Fence. Written by twelve Japanese American elders who gathered regularly at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, Making Home from War is a collection of stories about their exodus from concentration camps into a world that in a few short years had drastically changed. In order to survive, they found the resilience they needed in the form of community, and gathered reserves of strength from family and friends. Through a spectrum of conflicting and rich emotions, Making Home from War demonstrates the depth of human resolve and faith during a time of devastating upheaval.

Complete with family stories and photos, this elegant memoir illuminates a world of sustainable bounty—full of abalone, salmon, seaweed, and strawberries. It is at once a pleasure to read and a lesson in survival: the survival of the foods and of the people themselves.