Milkweed & Heyday Books present Terria Smith book launch

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Terria Smith is a tribal member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians and a proud original Californian. She is the editor of News from Native California magazine and director of the Berkeley Roundhouse, Heyday’s California Indian publishing program. Smith is also the editor of the 2023 anthology Know We Are Here: Voices of Native California Resistance. She received her undergraduate degree at Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly Humboldt State University) and earned her master’s degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She lives on her ancestral homelands in the Coachella Valley with her puppy Havana.

Halee Kirkwood’s forthcoming debut poetry collection, To Think of a Match, will be published with Northwestern University Press in March 2027. Their debut nonfiction book, Heartsong Cartographies, will be published with University of Minnesota Press in winter 2028. They were an inaugural and returning Indigenous Nations Poets (IN-NA-PO) fellow, a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, a 2023-2025 Jerome Foundation Artist Fellow, a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Fellow, and a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant recipient. Winner of the 2022 James Welch Poetry Prize, published with Poetry Northwest, their poems can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Ecotone, Water~Stone Review, and others. They are a first generation direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.