Looking into the Heart of Arizona with Tom Zoellner

Join us at the Arizona Heritage Center in Tempe as we host author and historian Tom Zoellner. In 2019, Tom Zoellner hiked the 790-mile Arizona Trail. Not only did he journey through the physicality of Arizona -- its canyons, mountains, cities, deserts, plateaus, reservoirs and small towns -- but also through its astonishing history. Tom joins us to talk about his sojourn, which is brilliantly documented in his new book Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona. Not only is the book a quest for the origin of Arizona's enigmatic name, but it’s also a probing look into the past: the roots of the state’s colorful politics, literary heritage, music, cuisine, geology, and complex mix of races and traditions—the whole dazzling combination of elements that make the 48th state a prism of the past and unique laboratory of the future. 

Tom Zoellner, a fifth generation Arizonan, is the author of eight nonfiction books including The Heartless Stone, Uranium, Train, A Safeway in Arizona and Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Republic, American Scholar, Time, The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and many other places. He teaches at Chapman University and Dartmouth College and also serves as the politics editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books