PRESS
Sauer awarded a Sacatar Fellowship [2024]
Izzy Astuto reviews Almonds are Members of the Peach Family for Sundress Publications [2023]
Paper Is People, curated by Sauer and Tia Blassingame, opens at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and travels to the San Francisco Center for the Book [2023]
Sauer awarded research residency in Chapada Diamantina, Brazil [2022]
Almonds are Members of the Peach Family named finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction [2020]
Emily Wolahan reviews Almonds are Members of the Peach Family for Colorado Review [2020]
Almonds are Members of the Peach Family named one of the best nonfiction books of 2019 by Entropy [2019]
Sauer's newest manuscript wins Noemi Press' Book Prize in Prose [2018]
Sauer wins the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for Nonfiction [2017]
Urayoán Noel discusses Sauer's The Ancient Documentaries of Southside Park in American Literary History [2017]
Josh T Franco reviews The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force for Diálogo [2017]
Santa Fe New Mexican reviews The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force [2017]
The Accidental Archives featured on City Lights Books' Pedagogies of Resistance reading list [2017]
University of Texas Press profiles new book [2016]
Sauer performs at City Lights Books [2016]
Entropy interviews Sauer and names Copilot one of the Best Presses of the Year [2015]
The Guardian highlights I Dare You and the Al-mutanabbi Street Starts Here project [2014]
The Poetry Foundation features Open Press panel and new work [2014]
Music & Lterature hosts a roundtable discussion on bringing the work of Hilda Hilst into English [2014]
A Folha de São Paulo features Sauer and Gontijo Araujo on the cover of its culture section [2013]
Sacramento News & Review's "Top 25 Up-and-Coming Talents" [2011]
HTMLGIANT names Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist among favorite books of the year [2011]
Speak Without Interruption reviews Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist [2011]
The Union artist profile [2011]
El Tecolote covers San Francisco release of The Ancient Documentaries of Southside Park [2011]
Sacramento News & Review feature [2010]
Rain Taxi reviews Los Compas [2010]
PRAISE for Almonds are Members of the Peach Family
"Imagine air composed of salt and the opposite of salt: someone who can no longer excrete, weep, kiss, or vomit. Who is dead? “The air is composed of saline and the once living,” writes Stephanie Sauer, writing the brink-verge of an impossible city, a city (Rio) that “has no regard for survival.” Entering the work through this magnetizing and umcompromising “day,” the book’s morning or start, the reader is soon breathing night: Judith Herman’s concept of trauma, of what it will take to recover ideals of family or psychological life in the time that follows an atrocity; the “bruised little girl flesh,” and the encroaching violence of an authoratarian regime. Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family is adept at turning this narrative over to show us the “back-stitch,” the parts of living like this (with others) that we rarely get to see. I was very touched by Sauer’s precision and sweetness as she decocts the lineage story of the grandmother, in particular. The weight and sorrow of elegy are performed in a non-dominant verse that has enough space in it for other worlds, other languages and new sounds. Because: “I am unable to fill in the ligaments. I am working with bones and a superficial filling would be untrue.” There’s information, here, about what it would take to discharge something long held or contained in somatic memory. Tell the truth about what happened to the body, this book seems to say. Tell the truth about the time in which the body got to be a body, and make it real. All of this feels like brave and vital work for a poet to be attending to. Stephanie Sauer has written an important book."
--Bhanu Kapil
"Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family, is an immaculate meditation in prose, masterfully and poetically aligned. Examining cases from domestic abuse, to national (in)security, to cultural and familial traditions and stigmas, Sauer’s triangulation of histories, theories, and experience revalorizes the overlooked revolutions charged by women in both public and private spaces. Her cadence and distillation of evolution is measured out and noted by the pricking of time as fabric, the ache of the hands and heart at work, the sonorous hum of thread pulled when one thing is stitched to another: this body, that body. This is a time capsule, a manifesto—at once unraveling and embodying the weight and force of a woman at work."
--Laurie Ann Guerrero
"Stephanie Sauer’s deftly written lyrical memoir, Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family, presents domestic violence, the legacy of trauma, art-making, and depression as part collage, part crazy quilt—asking us to rethink received ideas of the personal narrative. There is a huge range in this fascinating book, and while a conventional memoir might tie its threads neatly together, Sauer resists convention and instead enacts in her prose the expansive thinking and experience being described."
--Emily Wolahan, Colorado Review
"Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds are Members of the Peach Family is a masterful multimedia project that weaves together prose and craftsmanship, bringing light to buried historical narratives."
--Izzy Astuto, Sundress Publications
PRAISE for The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force
"What a magnificent project—a blend of curation, art history, archaeology, and, perhaps most important, a book tinged with the trace of ludic savvy, the ‘ludic’ being at the heart of the Royal Chicano Air Force, a playful intervention, an intervening play, both at the same time. The volume archives in book form an artistic performance/event that has not been documented. It does so with vision and acuity and, essential here, with wit! Stephanie Sauer’s gift is to have compiled a working archive that mimes the logic of the Royal Chicano Air Force without overshadowing it in any way.”
--WILLIAM A. NERICCIO, author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America
"To make an artist-book to pay homage to the contributions of an artist collective is significant because it has not been attempted within Chicana/o art history. This is an entirely new strategy—unique, original, and witty—that allows for highly detailed accounts of RCAF history. The artist, Stephanie Sauer, is interested in the destruction and creation of history and how archival material is preserved, who decides, and how power informs knowledge production. Her book stands on its own as a work of art, a codex of the RCAF.”
--KAREN MARY DAVALOS, author of Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora
"As a curator for the largest institutional archive for primary source documents related to American art, I had to relinquish some deeply held notions of order to keep turning the page. As a thirty-something Chicanx, I felt utterly at home in this art history...The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force scrapes. And scrapes. And scrapes. At any convention of anthropology and art history a reader might bring. It’s gonna hurt. The trip, the hallucination, is worth it."
--JOSH T. FRANCO, Latino Collections Specialist, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
"Truth is what Stephanie Sauer, in her guise as the archivist character La Stef, is both seeking and subverting in The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force, the record of a rebel art collective that is at once full of truths and half-truths, evidence and facts, myths, exaggerations, and maybe even a few whoppers....The task of the reader is not so much to separate the truth from the rest but to synthesize it all into a cohesive narrative. Yes, the story is full of holes, and La Stef, in that age-old habit we have of imposing order on chaos and patterns on nature, fills the holes with marvelous invention. But we do the same every time we, as individuals, tell our own stories, and they are no less bereft of meaning for that."
--MICHAEL ABATEMARCO, Santa Fe New Mexican
Sauer awarded a Sacatar Fellowship [2024]
Izzy Astuto reviews Almonds are Members of the Peach Family for Sundress Publications [2023]
Paper Is People, curated by Sauer and Tia Blassingame, opens at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and travels to the San Francisco Center for the Book [2023]
Sauer awarded research residency in Chapada Diamantina, Brazil [2022]
Almonds are Members of the Peach Family named finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction [2020]
Emily Wolahan reviews Almonds are Members of the Peach Family for Colorado Review [2020]
Almonds are Members of the Peach Family named one of the best nonfiction books of 2019 by Entropy [2019]
Sauer's newest manuscript wins Noemi Press' Book Prize in Prose [2018]
Sauer wins the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for Nonfiction [2017]
Urayoán Noel discusses Sauer's The Ancient Documentaries of Southside Park in American Literary History [2017]
Josh T Franco reviews The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force for Diálogo [2017]
Santa Fe New Mexican reviews The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force [2017]
The Accidental Archives featured on City Lights Books' Pedagogies of Resistance reading list [2017]
University of Texas Press profiles new book [2016]
Sauer performs at City Lights Books [2016]
Entropy interviews Sauer and names Copilot one of the Best Presses of the Year [2015]
The Guardian highlights I Dare You and the Al-mutanabbi Street Starts Here project [2014]
The Poetry Foundation features Open Press panel and new work [2014]
Music & Lterature hosts a roundtable discussion on bringing the work of Hilda Hilst into English [2014]
A Folha de São Paulo features Sauer and Gontijo Araujo on the cover of its culture section [2013]
Sacramento News & Review's "Top 25 Up-and-Coming Talents" [2011]
HTMLGIANT names Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist among favorite books of the year [2011]
Speak Without Interruption reviews Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist [2011]
The Union artist profile [2011]
El Tecolote covers San Francisco release of The Ancient Documentaries of Southside Park [2011]
Sacramento News & Review feature [2010]
Rain Taxi reviews Los Compas [2010]
PRAISE for Almonds are Members of the Peach Family
"Imagine air composed of salt and the opposite of salt: someone who can no longer excrete, weep, kiss, or vomit. Who is dead? “The air is composed of saline and the once living,” writes Stephanie Sauer, writing the brink-verge of an impossible city, a city (Rio) that “has no regard for survival.” Entering the work through this magnetizing and umcompromising “day,” the book’s morning or start, the reader is soon breathing night: Judith Herman’s concept of trauma, of what it will take to recover ideals of family or psychological life in the time that follows an atrocity; the “bruised little girl flesh,” and the encroaching violence of an authoratarian regime. Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family is adept at turning this narrative over to show us the “back-stitch,” the parts of living like this (with others) that we rarely get to see. I was very touched by Sauer’s precision and sweetness as she decocts the lineage story of the grandmother, in particular. The weight and sorrow of elegy are performed in a non-dominant verse that has enough space in it for other worlds, other languages and new sounds. Because: “I am unable to fill in the ligaments. I am working with bones and a superficial filling would be untrue.” There’s information, here, about what it would take to discharge something long held or contained in somatic memory. Tell the truth about what happened to the body, this book seems to say. Tell the truth about the time in which the body got to be a body, and make it real. All of this feels like brave and vital work for a poet to be attending to. Stephanie Sauer has written an important book."
--Bhanu Kapil
"Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family, is an immaculate meditation in prose, masterfully and poetically aligned. Examining cases from domestic abuse, to national (in)security, to cultural and familial traditions and stigmas, Sauer’s triangulation of histories, theories, and experience revalorizes the overlooked revolutions charged by women in both public and private spaces. Her cadence and distillation of evolution is measured out and noted by the pricking of time as fabric, the ache of the hands and heart at work, the sonorous hum of thread pulled when one thing is stitched to another: this body, that body. This is a time capsule, a manifesto—at once unraveling and embodying the weight and force of a woman at work."
--Laurie Ann Guerrero
"Stephanie Sauer’s deftly written lyrical memoir, Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family, presents domestic violence, the legacy of trauma, art-making, and depression as part collage, part crazy quilt—asking us to rethink received ideas of the personal narrative. There is a huge range in this fascinating book, and while a conventional memoir might tie its threads neatly together, Sauer resists convention and instead enacts in her prose the expansive thinking and experience being described."
--Emily Wolahan, Colorado Review
"Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds are Members of the Peach Family is a masterful multimedia project that weaves together prose and craftsmanship, bringing light to buried historical narratives."
--Izzy Astuto, Sundress Publications
PRAISE for The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force
"What a magnificent project—a blend of curation, art history, archaeology, and, perhaps most important, a book tinged with the trace of ludic savvy, the ‘ludic’ being at the heart of the Royal Chicano Air Force, a playful intervention, an intervening play, both at the same time. The volume archives in book form an artistic performance/event that has not been documented. It does so with vision and acuity and, essential here, with wit! Stephanie Sauer’s gift is to have compiled a working archive that mimes the logic of the Royal Chicano Air Force without overshadowing it in any way.”
--WILLIAM A. NERICCIO, author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America
"To make an artist-book to pay homage to the contributions of an artist collective is significant because it has not been attempted within Chicana/o art history. This is an entirely new strategy—unique, original, and witty—that allows for highly detailed accounts of RCAF history. The artist, Stephanie Sauer, is interested in the destruction and creation of history and how archival material is preserved, who decides, and how power informs knowledge production. Her book stands on its own as a work of art, a codex of the RCAF.”
--KAREN MARY DAVALOS, author of Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora
"As a curator for the largest institutional archive for primary source documents related to American art, I had to relinquish some deeply held notions of order to keep turning the page. As a thirty-something Chicanx, I felt utterly at home in this art history...The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force scrapes. And scrapes. And scrapes. At any convention of anthropology and art history a reader might bring. It’s gonna hurt. The trip, the hallucination, is worth it."
--JOSH T. FRANCO, Latino Collections Specialist, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
"Truth is what Stephanie Sauer, in her guise as the archivist character La Stef, is both seeking and subverting in The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force, the record of a rebel art collective that is at once full of truths and half-truths, evidence and facts, myths, exaggerations, and maybe even a few whoppers....The task of the reader is not so much to separate the truth from the rest but to synthesize it all into a cohesive narrative. Yes, the story is full of holes, and La Stef, in that age-old habit we have of imposing order on chaos and patterns on nature, fills the holes with marvelous invention. But we do the same every time we, as individuals, tell our own stories, and they are no less bereft of meaning for that."
--MICHAEL ABATEMARCO, Santa Fe New Mexican
