NewPages Blog

Zakiya’s Enduring Wounds
Roosevelt High School Series
Fiction by Gloria L. Velásquez
Piñata Books, September 2022

Zakiya, a sophomore at Roosevelt High School, has settled into the new school year. She loves her friends, the volleyball team and her dance class. There’s even a cute guy she has her eye on. But her world falls apart when her dad dies unexpectedly. Zakiya had a special relationship with her father and is completely devastated by his death. After the funeral, her friends and family try to console her, but Zakiya pushes them away. She just wants to be alone. She quits the volleyball team, shuts down the boy she once dreamed of dating and even skips school. When she experiences a frightening episode of anxiety, she discovers that cutting herself helps to relieve the pain. Will she ever learn how to deal with her grief and sense of loss?

The Sign Catcher
Biography by Otilio Quintero
Arte Publico Press, March 2022

As a young boy, Otilio Quintero lived with his family in abject poverty in a labor camp in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Later, they moved to a housing project that exposed him to the madness of violence. Despite his difficult childhood, he managed to go to college. But more important to his development was a trip to Mexico in which he was taken in and taught by the Mayan Chol people. In his memoir, The Sign Catcher, Quintero writes he found his calling at an indigenous ceremony during The Longest Walk, a 3,000-mile march across the country—from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco to Washington, DC—in 1978 by Native Americans to protest federal attacks on their way of life. The marchers carried the sacred pipe to the nation’s capital and ultimately legislative bills detrimental to indigenous people were defeated. His life took a dramatic turn when he found himself in a maximum-security prison facing a possible 20-year sentence.

In Defense of My People
Hispanic Civil Rights Series
By Alonso S. Perales, Trans. by Emilio Zamora
Arte Publico Press, November 2021

Originally published in Spanish in 1936 and 1937, In Defense of My People contains articles, letters and speeches written by Alonso S. Perales, one of the most influential civil rights activists of the early twentieth century. When Mexican-American veterans of World War II were denied service in a South Texas pool hall, even while wearing their uniforms, Perales wrote about the incident for The San Antonio Express. He also exhorted his community to secure an education and participate in civic duties. His form letter, “How to Request School Facilities for Our Children,” helped parents secure schools “equal to those furnished children of Anglo-American descent.”

Watchman, What of the Night
Poems by W. Luther Jett
CW Books, June 2022

W. Luther Jett’s newest collection, Watchman, What of the Night? bears witness to a world in turmoil, as tyrants rise with the warming seas, while entire generations are displaced by war and catastrophe. The poet asks, what centre can hold in this whirlwind night? Here are poems which speak of past calamities in order to hold up a lamp to pierce the present murk and fog in search of clarity. This book is an alarm-bell, a cry in the night, and above all else, a call to action. Visit the CW Books website to read a sample from the collection.