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Magazine hosts booksigning for prize-winning author
New Mexico Magazine will host a book launch and signing for Christine Barber's novel The Replacement Child — the first-ever winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize for mystery novel — from at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 1 at Page One Books, 11018 Montgomery Blvd N.E. in Albuquerque.
New Mexico Magazine ran an exclusive excerpt of The Replacement Child in the October edition, on newsstands now. Also inside this month's magazine: pedal the path of the ancients at the Ancient Way Cycling Tour, get a light-hearted look at consulting a clairvoyant, and learn which New Mexican folk monsters might be creeping toward your door.
About the book:
Late on a Monday night, editor Lucy Newroe answers the phone in the Capital Tribune newsroom. The caller is the notorious Scanner Lady---an anonymous elderly tipster whose hobby is to phone the newspaper with gossip from her police scanner. The old woman tells Lucy she heard two Santa Fe cops discussing a dead body. But when Lucy checks out the tip, she discovers Scanner Lady has been killed.
She tries to enlist the help of Detective Gil Montoya, but his mind is on another death. He has just been handed the case of Melissa Baca, a seventh-grade teacher whose body was thrown off the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. Over the course of the next few days, as Lucy and Gil hunt down the culprits in each murder, they discover their cases are intertwined in the most intimate ways.
Rich with details of New Mexico and the people who live there, The Replacement Child is the perfect novel for anyone who has fallen in love with the Southwest that Tony Hillerman described so artfully in his Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries.
About the author:
Christine Barber is an award-winning journalist as well as a certified emergency medical technician and firefighter. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is currently pursuing a career in medicine. She previously worked as an editor at the Santa Fe New Mexican and a journalist for the Albuquerque Journal and Gallup Independent. The Replacement Child is her first novel.
Willie Murphy to sign 2009 calendar at Santa Fe gallery
Navajo painter Willie Murphy, featured artist for the 2009 Enchanting New Mexico Calendar, signs copies of the calendar from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, September 26 at Art Exchange Gallery, 60 East San Francisco Street, Suite 213-214 (in the Santa Fe Arcade). The event is in conjunction with an exhibition of Murphy's paintings that continues through September 30.
The 2009 calendar, published by New Mexico Magazine, showcases Murphy's splendid landscape oil paintings. His realistic works, tinged with romanticism, evoke the everyday life of the Navajo people amidst the spectacular vistas of their homeland. A sense of timelessness and quiet emotion permeates the powerful images of Navajos in the traditional pursuits of herding sheep, stocking up at the trading post and heading home on horseback.
Murphy, who resides in Crownpoint on the eastern side of the Navajo Nation, is a self-taught artist whose love for drawing began in elementary school. His path to an art career followed many twists and turns, but by the 1990s he was painting full time. Murphy has won a number of awards from prestigious art shows across the Southwest, including the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, the Heard Indian Market, and the Santa Fe Indian Market. In addition to Art Exchange Gallery, he exhibits his work at Richardson's Trading Post in Gallup.
Magazine Contributor Wins Travel Writing Award
Albuquerque freelance writer Kay Grant has won a North American Travel Journalists Association award for her feature article in the June 2007 issue of New Mexico Magazine on Buffalo Soldier Cathay Williams.
The article, entitled "Working Undercover: An Unusual Buffalo Soldier Kept an Extraordinary Secret," reveals how Cathay Williams disguised her identity and masqueraded as a man in order to join the Buffalo Soldiers in 1866.
Grant won the runner-up award for Best Personality Profile. The North American Travel Journalists Association announced the award in December 2007.
Cathay Williams enlisted in the Buffalo Soldiers as William Cathey and spent the bulk of her military career on the frontier in territorial New Mexico, serving at Fort Union outside Las Vegas, N.M., and Fort Cummings near present-day in the Bootheel region of southwestern New Mexico.
By 1868, Williams grew tired of the charade and military life, disclosing her true identity. Her comrades were enraged at being deceived, but nevertheless referred to her as a "he" in Williams' discharge papers. The reason: The officers could have gotten into trouble, even possibly enduring a court martial, if it became widely known there had been a female solider in the unit.
Williams retired to Raton near Fort Union, and also lived awhile in Trinidad, Colorado, reportedly dying in the early to mid-1890s.