"This is a story of a tough young man who lost his way, and of a loving God who never forgot him, no matter where he was." -- Nicky Cruz, bestselling author of Run Baby Run

The son of El Salvadorian immigrants, Casey Diaz was brought to Los Angeles at the age of two. An abusive, impoverished family life propelled Casey at only eleven years of age into the Rockwood Street Locos gang. Casey was willing to do anything to be number one, but years of chasing rival gang members led to a dramatic ambush and arrest by the LAPD.

At just sixteen, Casey was sentenced to more than twelve years in solitary confinement in California's toughest prison as one of the state's most violent offenders. He thought his life was over.

Yet, when a determined elderly woman paid Casey a visit, a whole new world of possibilities began to unfold. Casey scoffed as she quietly insisted God was going to use him. As the days in solitary wore on, Casey realized Someone else was calling the shots. What happened next can only be described as a miracle.

Perfect for:

• People who believe they're too far gone
• Parents who want to keep their kids out of gangs - what are the warning signs
• Social workers who interact with at-risk youth
• Those looking for a gritty, informed perspective on LA street gangs and gang culture

 A visceral insider's look at the violent world of gangs and prison life, The Shot Caller is a remarkable demonstration of God's reckless, unending grace and His desire to reach even the worst of sinners--no matter where they are.

Binding / Paperback: 224 pages

Publish Date: April 2, 2019

About the Author
Designer and professional tattoo artist Erik Siuda studied illustration at New York City's School of Visual Arts and apprenticed at Triple X Tattoo (later Red Rocket Tattoo). Erik is skilled in several media, and he designs in watercolors, airbrushing, and digital. He is nationally known for his appearance on season five of the Spike TV show Ink Master(R).

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The poems in Manuel Paul López's The Yearning Feed, winner of the 2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the U.S.-Mexico border. López, an Imperial Valley native, considers La Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies play out on a daily basis. These poems synthesize López's knowledge of modern and contemporary literature with a border-child vernacular sensibility to produce a work that illustrates the ongoing geographical and literary historical clash of cultures.

With humor and lyrical intensity, López addresses familial relationships, immigration, substance abuse, violence, and, most importantly, the affirmation of life. In the poem titled Psalm, the speaker experiences a deep yearning to relearn his family's Spanish tongue, a language lost somewhere in the twelve-mile stretch between his family's home, his school, and the border. The poem "1984" borrows the prose-poetics of Joe Brainard, who was known for his collage and assemblage work of the 1960s and 1970s, to describe the poet's bicultural upbringing in the mid-1980s. Many of the poems in The Yearning Feed use a variety of media, techniques, and cultural signifiers to create a hybrid visual language that melds "high" art with low. The poems in The Yearning Feed establish López as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry, one who challenges popular perceptions of the border region and uses the unique elements of the rich border experience to inform and guide his aesthetics.

Author: Manuel Paul López
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 08/28/2013
Pages: 136
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.40d
ISBN13: 9780268033897
ISBN10: 0268033897
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | Hispanic & Latino
- Literary Criticism | Poetry

About the Author
Manuel Paul Lopez's work has been published in Bilingual Review/La Revista bilingue, ZYZZYVA, Hanging Loose, and Rattle, among others, and anthologized in Roque Dalton Redux. Lopez has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of Death of a Mexican and Other Poems, which was awarded the Dorothy Brunsman Prize.

Lyrical and] haunting, Am rica's liberating epiphany will have readers . . . on their feet and cheering. -- Washington Post

Deftly written and fiercely resilient, Am rica's Dream explores the ever-shifting definition of what it means to be American and exemplifies the spirit of every immigrant who has dared to realize the American dream.

Am rica Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her in the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with Am rica. So when Am rica is offered the chance to work as a live-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester, New York, she takes it as a sign to finally make the escape she's been longing for.

Yet, even as Am rica revels in the comparative luxury of her new life--daring to care about a man other than Correa--she is faced with the disquieting realization that no matter what she does, she can never really escape her past.

About the Author
Cristina Rivera Garza es norteña y errante a la vez. Escritora y lectora, sobre todo. Entre sus novelas se distinguen Nadie me verá llorar y La muerte me da -ambas ganadoras del Premio Internacional Sor Juana-FIL en 2001 y 2009, respectivamente-. Ha publicado cinco libros de poesía: La más mía, Los textos del yo, El disco de Newton. Diez ensayos sobre el color, Viriditas y La imaginación pública. En Los muertos indóciles. Necroescritura y desapropiación lleva a cabo un análisis comparativo de la más reciente producción literaria en Latinoamérica y Estados Unidos en tiempos de horrísona violencia y amplio acceso a la tecnología digital. Ganó el Premio Internacional Roger Caillois (Francia, 2013), y la Universidad de Houston le otorgó un Doctorado Honoris Causa. Señalada como una de las escritoras más influyentes en la red, Rivera Garza mantiene un blog-archivo (www. cristinariveragarza.blogspot.com) y una activa cuenta de Twitter (@criveragarza). Puede encontrársele en cristinariveragarza. com. Nacida en Matamoros, Tamaulipas, reside en Estados Unidos desde 1989. Actualmente es profesora distinguida de Estudios Hispánicos y Escritura Creativa en la Universidad de Houston.

"Extraordinary...reach[es] a new, unexpected, dissident realism." --Alejandro Zambra, author of My Documents and Multiple Choice

Alone again in a Chile punctuated by graves, footsteps, x-rays, and crosses, Nancy looks back on her life. Before her cancer, before her husband's ridiculous death, before she fled home hidden in the back of a truck, she spent her youth at Playa Roja, hearing the rumors of disappeared girls and dead boys while swimming alongside her friends and the creepy old gringos. Her family lost to religion, alcohol, and violence, Nancy has been forced to fend for herself in a world designed to crush her. She keeps going despite it all.

And now, recounting her story from her deathbed, Nancy takes this life in her hands, shapes it anew, and turns it into something else: not a mere calendar of crossed-out days but a wholly original testament to the quiet dignity of a difficult journey.

Benjamin, on the verge of becoming a father, discovers a tragic family secret involving patrimony and determines to get to the root of. Those most immediately involved are all dead, but their three closest confidantes are still alive--Isabel, his grandmother; Haroldo, his grandfather's friend; and Raul, his father's friend--and each will tell him a different version of the facts.

By collecting these shards of memories, which offer personal glimpses into issues of class and politics in Brazil, Benjamin will piece together the painful puzzle of his family history. Like a Faulkner novel, Beatriz Bracher's brilliant Antonioshows the expansiveness of past events and the complexity of untangling long-buried secrets.

Dazzling. . . . An imaginative documentation of nature's sway over man. --New York Times Book Review

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, an important and passionate novel set in Peru, that explores man's struggle with both nature and civilization

Vargas Llosa's classic early novel takes place in Puira, a Peruvian town situated between desert and jungle, and which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, thus setting of a chain-reaction with extraordinary consequences.

This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute: Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both excitement and escape.

The conflicting forces that haunt the Green House evoke a world balanced between savagery and civilization--and one which is cursed by not being able to discern between the two.

This is an autobiography of my father, Julio Gomez, who grew up in the rough streets of East Los Angeles, in a much different world than what we have come to know today. He had emptied his soul in his last will and testament before taking his own life on his fifty-eighth birthday and emailed me this book before he went. My brother and I are his legacy, and this is his legend.

In this spellbinding debut, Los Angeles-born poet Janel Pineda sings of communal love and the diaspora and dreams for a liberated future. Lineage of Rain traces histories of Salvadoran migration and the US-sponsored civil war to reimagine trauma as a site for transformation and healing. With a scholar's caliber, Pineda archives family memory, crafting a collection that centers intergenerational narratives through poems filled with a yearning to crystallize a new world--one unmarked by patriarchal violence. At their heart, many of these poems are an homage to women: love letters to mothers, sisters, and daughters.

Lineage of Rain moves from los campos de El Salvador to the firework-laden streets of South Gate to the riverbanks of England. Pineda's masterful stroke weaves together these seemingly disparate worlds, illustrating the complicated reality of living as a first-generation student. As the speaker navigates elitism and the violence of the English language, she lays bare their ties to power. And yet, these poems rebel through revel, asking: how do we hold each other tenderly in a world replete with pain and many forms of violence? With dreams made possible through collective struggle, Pineda returns us to the seeds from which we bloom: family, history, and community. All the while, this collection never fails to capture often overlooked moments of joy--the mundane yet monumental--showing the reader that the world we dream is already ours. Through Lineage of Rain, Pineda emerges as a seminal contributor to the canon of Central American diasporic writing.

About the Author

Janel Pineda (b. 1996 Los Angeles, CA) is a Salvadoran poet and educator. A first-generation college graduate, she earned a BA in English from Dickinson College, where she was a Posse Scholar. Pineda has performed her poetry internationally in both English and Spanish, and been published in LitHub, PANK, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S., among others. She is a part of the editorial team that founded La Piscucha Magazine, a multilingual arts, literature, and culture magazine created by Salvadoran writers. Since her involvement with the 2018 Radical Roots Delegation, Pineda is also a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). She is currently pursuing dual master's degrees in creative writing and gender studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a Marshall Scholar.

About the Author
Sofia Guadarrama Collado is a bestselling author of fourteen novels including Piso 931 and Tezozómoc.

A Blessing the Boats Selection
A New York Times Books New & Notable Poetry Book
One of Big Other's Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020
On The Rumpus's list of What To Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner

In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez's second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.

The title refers to the year 1970--the "year of the Metal Dog" in the lunar calendar--which was the year of the author's birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father's snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation.

In poems and lamentations that evoke Hecuba, the mythic figure so consumed by grief over the atrocities of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, and La Llorona, the weeping woman in Mexican folklore who haunts the riverbanks in mourning and threatens to disturb the complicity of those living in the present, Paredez recontextualizes the historical moments of the Vietnam era, from the arrest of Angela Davis to the haunting image of Mary Ann Vecchio at the Kent State Massacre, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women's voices have carried across time.

About the Author

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. Her poetry and prose explore the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. She is author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and of the poetry collection This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002). She also serves as Series Co-Editor of the CantoMundo Poetry Book Prize awarded annually to a collection by a Latinx poet. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Poetry, Poet Lore, and the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (Norton 2018).

Paredez received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Performance at Northwestern University and her BA in English at Trinity University. Her work has been shaped by her encounters with women of color, feminism, formalist poetry, diva performances, and by her experiences as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran immigrant father and a mother whose nursing skills could patch up many wounds. Born and raised in San Antonio, she has lived on both coasts, endured a handful of Chicago winters, and taught American poetry in Paris. She currently lives with her husband, historian Frank Guridy, and their daughter in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and Co-Founder and Co-Director of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latina/o poets.

About the Author
Sandra Benítez is the author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers and the winner of the 1998 American Book Award, Bitter Grounds.

This book is a requiem. The original title of this book was The World Is a Barrio. The idea was to pay homage to the band, WAR. The song, "The World Is a Ghetto" inspired me to see the world differently. It encouraged me to see the world beyond the one I lived in. And, the world I was raised in was one of gangs, sex, drugs, violence, poverty, systemic/structural racism, education inequity, health disparity, food insecurity, patriotism, and death. A ghetto. A barrio. For whatever reason, so many in the world want to forget this world existed and still does. Some cancel-culture cancels culture. I used the title for my second novel instead.

Then, I wanted to title the book, The Pinche Piñata. This title was a metaphor-a play on the expression, "Mi vida loca." It was the original title of my second novel. I shopped the manuscript back in 2011. No one was ready to publish a book that examined transgender identity development and gender dysphoria. No one wanted to watch a boy grow up in the barrio and survive his machismo family. Or, maybe it was because less than 10 percent of the fiction-authors published are people of color.

The meaning of the title, The Pinche Piñata, was intended to describe how my life felt. I have been a piñata. Life was the stick. That stick beat me again and again until I finally broke. And, that was when all the good stuff came pouring out-everyone ran up to take a piece. However, I felt uncomfortable cursing every time I told someone the title. It is not something I do very often. So, I called my daughter. She says, "Dad, your work is about the damage of being nurtured in an environment of toxic masculinity." She says, "How about, Toxic Masculinity?"

Another proud-dad moment. Of course . . . It was not life I survived, you survived, he survived, she survived, they survived, we survived. It was toxic masculinity. This book is a collection of poems based upon the lives of those that I have grieved, loved, feared, respected, and survived.

About the Author
Silvia Marina Arrom is Jane's Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies at Brandeis University. She has published widely on Mexican social history, with books and articles focusing on women and gender, the family, social welfare, and the poor.

Un coraz n puro puede iluminar aun la noche m s oscura.

Y en el m s terrible de los momentos de la historia.

Jocelyn es la guardiana de la Biblioteca de Saint-Malo, una mujer hu rfana que se aferra a la literatura y a su marido Antoine. Pero ambos corren peligro: la llegada de las tropas alemanas a la ciudad, en especial aquella del comandante Adolf Bauman, empe ado en robar algunos de los incunables que tan celosamente guarda la bibliotecaria, quiere acabar con su felicidad.

El capit n Hermann von Choltitz, amante de los libros, es enviado por las autoridades alemanas para expurgar las bibliotecas de la regi n, pero se resiste a destruirlos. Jocelyn y Hermann comenzar n una amistad imposible: los libros les unen, pero la violencia y la guerra los separa.

Destinados a ser enemigos y obligados a vivir en un mundo en el que se ha desatado la locura, los inolvidables protagonistas de esta hermosa y emocionante historia se convertir n en h roes cuyo amor vencer incluso a la guerra.

Los lectores que disfrutaron con La luz que nos puedes ver, de Anthony Doerr o El Ruise or, de Kristin Hannah, no podr n perderse esta historia de amor, pasi n y suspense.

Escobar] escribe historias que llegan al coraz n .

--Jes s Alejo Santiago, Revista Milenio

MARIO ESCOBAR es novelista, historiador y colaborador habitual de National Geographic Historia, ha dedicado su vida a la investigaci n de los grandes conflictos humanos. Sus libros han sido traducidos a m s de doce idiomas, convirti ndose en bestsellers en pa ses como los Estados Unidos, Brasil, China, Rusia, Italia, M xico, Argentina y Jap n. Es el autor m s vendido en formato digital en espa ol en Amazon y fue otorgado el Premio de Novela Empik (Polonia, 2020).

About the Author
Helena María Viramontes is the acclaimed author of The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus; and the coeditor of two collections: Chicana (W)Rites: On Word and Film and Chicana Creativity and Criticism. She is the recipient of the 2006 Luis Leal Award and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, and her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and adopted for classroom use and university study. Viramontes lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a professor in the Department of English at Cornell University.

Will Cordeiro's Trap Street travels a shifting landscape. Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations. Cordeiro's vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer. This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things.

PRAISE FOR TRAP STREET

The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur. Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream. What's left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this. These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there. I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a book both of witness and warning.

-Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter

Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist. Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular. His declaration that "Earth's everything I am" runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding.

-David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound

"Not everything must have some cosmic meaning." That is the sort of red-wheelbarrow faith Will Cordeiro depends on as his adventurous eye records the variegated appearance of the natural and manmade world, no detail too small to merit commemoration. The scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus cited the "haecceitas" ("this-ness") of observed experience as one component in the quest for the divine, so there is every reason to regard Cordeiro's poems as bridging the gap between life's overlooked detritus and exalted vision itself. And visual acuity here is matched by a strenuous verbality, color-coordinated vowels informing chewable consonants in a lexicon ranging from "cattywampus" to "glumes" to "blear." It's a pied-beauty diction and syntax that remind me of Hopkins and Marianne Moore. We should all join in welcoming Will Cordeiro's amazing debut.

-Alfred Corn, author of The Poem's Heartbeat

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Will Cordeiro has work published in Agni, Best New Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Offing, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer's Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. Will received an MFA and PhD from Cornell University. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Currently, Will lives in Flagstaff and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.

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Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States and the first African American commander-in-chief. He served two terms, in 2008 and 2012. The son of parents from Kenya and Kansas, Obama was born and raised in Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review.

After serving on the Illinois State Senate, he was elected a U.S. senator representing Illinois in 2004. He and his wife Michelle Obama have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." - Barack Obama

This is the descriptive and concise biography of Barack Obama.

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About the Author
Maceo Montoya is an award-winning author, artist, and educator who has published books in a variety of genres. His books include The Scoundrel and the Optimist (awarded the 2011 International Latino Book Award for "Best First Book" and Latino Stories named him one of its "Top Ten New Latino Writers to Watch), The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, Letters to the Poet from His Brother, You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories (finalist for Foreword Review's INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award) among others. Montoya's paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in exhibitions and publications throughout the country as well as internationally. He is currently an associate professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at the University of California, Davis where he teaches courses on Chicanx culture and literature.

About the Author
Francisco Martín Moreno, uno de los autores más leídos en México, ha publicado una treintena de libros, la mayor parte novelas históricas, y más de 4 mil columnas en periódicos y revistas, tanto nacionales como internacionales. Goza de una gran reputación como novelista, conferencista, columnista y comentarista político.

Revised and updated with a new introduction by the author--and available in English for the first time--the moving story of a man who always wanted to be a father and the long emotional road to making his dream come true.

Born in Cuba and raised in the USA, Armando Lucas Correa epitomized the American dream. He had everything he wanted: an incredible job as the editor of People magazine, meeting and interviewing glamorous celebrities; a steady partner; and a comfortable life filled with travel. But with the new millennium, he realized something vital was missing. A child.

In the years before gay marriage was widespread and legal across the nation, the road to parenthood was difficult for gay couples. Though his family would not be traditional, Correa was undaunted. Every setback, each emotional challenge was fuel that drove him to fulfill his dream. Exhaustively researching the possibilities, Correa eventually chose surrogacy--a long, arduous, and expensive method involving seemingly endless tests, paperwork, and difficult decisions. But with the help of science, a lot of patience, an egg donor, a gestational mother, and the unconditional support of her partner and family, Correa's dream finally came true with the birth of his beloved daughter, Emma.

In Search of Emma is an inspiring and beautiful story of love, family, and fatherhood that reminds us of that, despite the odds, we must never stop fighting to achieve our dreams. Completely revised and updated to reflect his growing family.

My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a novel told in fifteen stories, linked by the same protagonist, our narrator, who--in her own voice and channeling the voices of others--creates an unsparing, multigenerational portrait of her native Cuba. Though she feels suffocated by the island and decides to leave, hers is not just a political novel--nor just a queer novel, an immigrant novel, a feminist novel--but a deeply existential one, in which mortality, corporeality, bureaucracy, emotional and physical violence, and the American Dream define the long journey of our narrator and her beloved pet dog, who gives the book both its title and its unforgettable ending. In its daring style and structure--both playful and profound, youthful and mature - and its frank discussion of political and sexual identity, My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog marks the emergence of an original and essential new voice.

About the Author

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias was born in 1984 in Camagüey, Cuba and now lives in Miami, where until recently she worked at a pizza parlor. She has won a number of major Cuban prizes including the Premio Iberoamericana de Cuento Julio Cortázar, the Premio Calendario de Cuento, the Premio Calendario de Poesía, and the Premio Casa de las Américas de Teatro for her first play, marking the first time the prize has been awarded to a Cuban exile. She is also the winner most recently of the 2016 Paz Prize for her book of poetry MIAMI CENTURY FOX . She has published eleven books of poetry, three books of stories, two novels, and four children's books. The vast majority have never left the island, where her rising star has been called El tsunami Legna.