By Mike Cook
“Celebrate Authors” will take place on Sunday, September 19, from 2pm to 4pm, in the boardroom and the Roadrunner Room on the second floor of the Thomas Branigan Memorial Library, 200 E. Picacho Ave.
The event is free and public.
Moonbow Alterations and Moonbow’s Book Nook are sponsoring the event.
Celebrate Authors 2021 presents 40 authors from Las Cruces and the surrounding area with books published in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The event started in 2014.
Here are three additions to the list of participating authors.
Lisa LuccaHis work has been published in several anthologies, most recently in “Crone Rising”.
“I am the co-author of a letter reminder (in the form of letters) with my partner Mark Mathias, ‘You are loved’,” said Lucca. “My upcoming memoir, Ashes to Ink, sheds light on the challenges of living the way we are and the power of family acceptance. It will be released in October 2021.
“I’m a #BlogHer Voice of the Year winner and a quarter-finalist in the 2020 Roadmap Authors Manuscript Competition,” said Lucca. “My weekly public radio show Live True is broadcast on KTAL-LP 101.5 FM in Las Cruces and streamed worldwide and offers our listeners insights and exciting interviews.
“For most of my life, my world has been steeped in the beauty of language,” said Lucca. “It has long been my wish to share my truth as I know it, to connect with others so that they feel something that gives them comfort or understanding, or annoys them enough to look into their hearts and ask , why. Because all art is just self-expression that evokes emotions.
“As a life coach for almost 20 years, I hope to inspire others to use their gifts in the world to create something meaningful,” she said. “As writers, we have the opportunity to heal a wound, start a conversation, educate and entertain. All we have to do is sit still long enough to let the words out. “
Carlos Melendrez The new book “I Know Where the Bodies Are Buried: There are Stories to Tell, Questions to Answer” “begins when this area was under Mexican rule and the family oversaw the Mexican colony known as Doña Ana Bend Colony “, he said. “The establishment of the family government in this area began under Mexican rule, held out during the Mexican versus American war, and lasted long after under American rule.”
He has a long history and an activist background, starting as a director of the Boycott Bank of America movement. He was also the executive director of EDGE, an alliance of civil rights and environmental organizations including the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Earth Island Institute, the Latino Issues Forum, the Japanese American Civil Rights League, and Urban Habitat.
Melendrez said his advice to aspiring writers was, “The same message my high school history teacher John Wooden gave me: ‘Illigitmus non carburundum’, loosely translated as ‘Don’t let the bastards crush you.'”
Jesus Barquets Books on literary criticism are “The Consecration of Havana”, which was awarded the Letras de Oro Prize in 1991; “Poetic Writings of a Nation”, which won the Lourdes-Casal Prize in 1998; and “Editions El Puente in Havana in the 1960s.”
His poetry books include: “Un no rompido sueño”, which won second prize in the 1994 Chicano-Latino Poetry Contest; “Aguja de diversos, adventurous journeys / Los viajes venturosos”; and the compilation “Cuerpos del delirio”.
Barquet is part of the Exodus Mariel Cuban in 1980 and is a professor emeritus at New Mexico State University and founder and director of Ediciones La Mirada, an editorial house founded in 2014 and based in Las Cruces.
As part of Celebrate Authors, Barquet will discuss “Manifiedto inacabado de la hegemonía, nomenclatura y nomenklaturacultural de nuevo cuño y coña”, a manifesto that was discovered in 2020 and describes the operation of an alleged chain of cultural supermarkets called “Gramsci” in the western world Century as well as the behavior of its customers, said Barquet.
He will also speak about Ediciones La Mirada, who has published 13 volumes of poetry in Spanish by Hispanic writers from the United States, Cuba, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Chile and Costa Rica. Two of the most popular books, according to Barquet, are “Imposeída” (the first compilation and Spanish translation of Mercedes de Acosta’s poems) and “Todo parecía” (the first anthology on LGBTQ issues in contemporary Cuban and Cuban-American poetry). In 2020, La Mirada started the “Colección Nuevas Voces (Collection of the New Voices)” with “De cierta arena” by the poet Maricela Duarte-Stern from Las Cruces, which is dedicated to the first volume of poetry by Hispanic poets.
“Spanish poetry, in particular, is a highly respected and centuries-old literary tradition that deserves careful preservation and maintenance,” said Barquet.
The Friends of Branigan Library launched Celebrate Authors in 2014. The event did not take place in 2020 due to the pandemic.
For more information, contact Alice Davenport at 575-527-1411 and [email protected] or Joy Miller at [email protected] or visit her at Moonbow’s Book Nook, 225 E. Idaho Ave., No. 32.
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