Children’s Book Recognized with Two Awards HOUSTON, TX June, 2014—The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto  by Diane de Anda with  illustrations by Oksana Kemarskaya has been recognized with a Skipping Stones Honor Award from Skipping Stones: An International Multicultural Magazine. Only 22 titles were selected to receive this year’s awards. It was also one of ten titles to be named an Honor Book in the 2014 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People from The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. Founded in 1988, Skipping Stones is a timely and timeless award-winning resource in multicultural and global education. It welcomes art and original writings in every language and from all ages. The mission of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College is to provide poetry events and workshops to a diverse audience and to provide opportunities for poets through contests, awards, a journal, anthologies, reference materials and conferences. Its mission …

Nicolás Kanellos, University of Houston Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies and director of Arte Público Press, will receive the prestigious 2014 Enrique Anderson Imbert award from the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE) or the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. The award recognizes the lifetime achievement of an individual who has contributed to the knowledge and dissemination of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture in the U.S. The award ceremony takes place June 7 at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Kanellos directs Arte Público Press, the nation’s largest and most established publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors, and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, which reconstitutes the literary and historical legacy of Hispanics in the U.S. from colonial times to 1960. To date, essays, autobiographies, historical and journalistic writings, novels, diaries and letters have been integrated into textbooks …

Houston, TX January 2014— Prolific Mexican-American author Rolando Hinojosa has been selected by the National Book Critics Circle as the recipient of the prestigious Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Named after the first president of the NBCC, the award is given annually to a person or institution—a writer, publisher, critic, or editor, among others—who has, over time, made significant contributions to book culture. The National Book Critics Circle Awards, considered among the most respected in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book-review editors. The awards will be presented on Thursday, March 13, at 6 pm at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium (66 W 12th Street, New York, NY 10011), and a finalists’ reading will be held on March 12, also at 6 pm at the same location. Both events are free and open to the public. Rolando Hinojosa is the author of the …

HOUSTON, TX March 2014—Three titles published by Arte Público Press were nominated as finalists in the 16th annual International Latino Book Awards sponsored by Latino Literacy Now, a non-profit organization that supports and promotes literacy and literary excellence within the Latino community. Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, is a collection containing personal essays in English and Spanish that deal with the impact of drug violence on people living along the Texas-Mexico border. It is a finalist for the Best Spanish or Bilingual Latino Focused Nonfiction Book. Desperado: A Mile-High Noir, by author and attorney Manuel Ramos, is a finalist in the Best Mystery Novel category. Ramos returns to novel-length crime fiction with a down-on-his-luck protagonist, Gus Corral, who is caught up in an investigation of the murder of an old high school friend, Artie. An investigation into Artie’s involvement in …

Come and stay a while at the Five-Star Hotel Juárez! HOUSTON, TX February, 2014—Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops by Daniel Chacón has won first place in the Tejas Foco 2014 Fiction Awards by the National Association for Chicana/o Studies. The Tejas Foco Fiction Awards recognize outstanding work of fiction or young adult fiction that best represents a significant topic related to Mexican American experience in Texas. The National Association for Chicana/o Studies (NACCS) is the academic organization that serves academic programs, departments and research centers that focus on issues pertaining to Mexican Americans, Chicana/os, and Latina/os. The Association was formed in 1972, during the height of the Chicana/o movement, and called for the development of a space where scholarship and Chicana/o students could develop their talents in higher education. In this collection of short and flash fiction, misconceptions about people, the responsibility of the artist and conflicts about identity …

HOUSTON, TX January, 2014—Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, is one of only twelve titles that has been selected to receive a 2013 Southwest Book Award by the Border Regional Library Association. This collection contains personal essays in English and Spanish that deal with the impact of drug violence on people living along the Texas-Mexico border. The Border Regional Library Association (BRLA) is an organization founded in 1966 for the promotion of library service and librarianship in the El Paso/Las Cruces/Juárez metroplex. Current membership includes over 100 librarians, paraprofessionals, media specialists and library friends and trustees from all types of libraries in the tri-state area of Trans-Pecos Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Chihuahua. Editors Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso write that this anthology was “born of a vision to bear witness to how violence has shattered life on the …