Denver-based mystery wins award in home state  HOUSTON, TX June 2014—A thriller with a bit of Chicano flair, Desperado: A Mile-High Noir by Manuel Ramos has won the 2014 Colorado Book Award for Best Mystery given by the Colorado Humanities. Since its founding in 1974, Colorado Humanities has inspired the people of Colorado to share and apply the wisdom and inspiration of the humanities and to appreciate the state’s diverse cultural heritage. Each year, Colorado Humanities provides opportunities to more than 200,000 people to enrich individual lives and inform the community experience. In Manuel Ramos’ return to crime fiction, his protagonist Gus Corral can’t quite believe it when Artie Baca, an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, asks him for help. He’s being blackmailed because of an imprudent fling—caught on video, of course. Artie has a prosperous real estate business and can afford to pay off the …

HOUSTON, TX June 2014—Three titles published by Arte Público Press were honored at the 16th annual International Latino Book Awards ceremony held during the American Library Association’s annual conference on June 28, 2014, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The awards honor literary excellence in a variety of categories and are 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, won First Place in the Best Spanish or Bilingual Latino Focused Nonfiction Book category. 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. Desperado: A Mile-High Noir, by author and attorney Manuel Ramos, won an Honorable Mention in the Best Mystery Novel category. Ramos returns to novel-length crime fiction with …

HOUSTON, TX June 2014—The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, led by Nicolás Kanellos and Carolina Villarroel at the University of Houston, is a 2014 recipient of the Diversity Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award will be presented at a ceremony during the Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists, the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, and SAA in Washington, DC, August 10-16, 2014. The award recognizes an individual, group, or institution for outstanding contributions in advancing diversity within the archives profession, SAA, or the archival record. The Recovery Project is being honored for its outstanding achievement in accessioning important Latino archives, organizing and describing them, and making them available broadly to educational institutions and communities via publication and electronic delivery. The project has accessioned, organized, and described such important collections like that of Leonor Villegas de Magnón, a …

Día Founder’s First Poetry Book Turns 30 HOUSTON, TX June 2014—Award-winning poet, essayist, and children’s book author Pat Mora’s first poetry collection, Chants, was published by Arte Público Press 30 years ago, launching her trailblazing career. The poems in this collection reflect life in the magical presence of the desert a place of inspiration for her.  Pat’s hometown, El Paso, the pass to the north, lies between vast stretches of desert. This is a geographic accident. Yet like everywhere, people live, love, marry, grow old and die. They also rejoice and despair. Mora’s poems reflect the joy and anguish of life, and in this volume two women poets sing, one in the guise of the desert, the other in the figure of Pat Mora. Together they intone Chants. Her debut poetry collection received numerous glowing reviews when it was first released: A Feminist Review called it “rich, spirited, and promising.” Highly praised …

HOUSTON, TX June 2014—Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops by Daniel Chacón was selected as a finalist in the Balcones Fiction Prize by the Balcones Center for Creative Writing at Austin Community College. The Balcones Center for Creative Writing is committed to recognizing outstanding works of literary merit through its Balcones Literary Prizes, worth $1,500 each. This is the fourth year the Center awards the Balcones Fiction Prize. In this collection of short and flash fiction, misconceptions about people, the responsibility of the artist and conflicts about identity pepper stories that take place in the U.S. and abroad. In one story, a girl remembers her father, who taught her to love books and libraries. “A book can whisper at you, call at you from the shelves. Sometimes a book can find you. Seek you out and ask you to come and play,” he told her. Years later, she finds herself …

  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 …