This volume vividly recounts, for general readers, the Roman town of Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and uniquely preserved for nearly two thousand years. Initial chapters offer an engaging historical overview of the town during antiquity, including the riveting story of its rediscovery in the eighteenth century, excavation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and broad cultural significance in modern times. Subsequent chapters offer an interpretive tour of the ancient town, then focus on one of Herculaneum’s grandest and most beautifully decorated private residences, known as the House of the Bicentenary. Located on the town’s main street, it has a range of features—original rooms, magnificent wall paintings and mosaics, and remarkable documents—that illuminate daily life in the ancient world. Final chapters bring the story up to date, including recent discoveries about the site and its famous papyrus manuscripts, as well as ongoing conservation initiatives.

Over twenty years ago, Sarah Cortez left a flourishing corporate career to strap on a gun, and police the streets. Transitioning from designer heels and a high-rise office to a low-bid, agency-owned Crown Vic wasn't easy, but it delivered exactly what she desired. In these highly-charged personal reflections, Cortez reveals the complicated machinery of a cop's heart, mind, and soul by dissecting the differences between cops and civilians. A must-read to understand the intangibles demanded by policing-courage, determination, patience, and a belief in justice-despite the grimy backdrop where life can become death in an instant.

The poems of Sarah Cortez flex lean muscles to build lyric intensity and a gripping edginess often backlit by an incandescent, controlled eroticism. Cortez reveals the hidden underworld of her fellow police officers, whose lives comprise the thin blue line and whose blood sometimes splashes and blackens on summer concrete.

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence.
Locals Listen to the Mariachi Band at El Jardin in San Miguel
You see their silhouettes along the stone wall
or arm in arm below the glow of garden lights
huddled like foothills, earth you could plant maize in.
Cowboy hats and serapes, the smell of beer and
cinnamon churros. You think of family and language
how the music rolls through your hips
to the sweat behind your knees. How it rushes
through you, to a place you still don't know.
--Lois P. Jones

This ground-breaking, mixed genre memoir journeys from the soil of Texas farmland near Floresville to the shrimpers' nets of the Gulf Coast, near Matagorda. Three generations of Hispanic families are viewed through the faith-filled lens of the miraculous and the poignancy of dreams never realized. The journey continues to mid-twentieth century Houston, where what is done is as powerful as that which never happened.

"Cold Blue Steel" contains fifty lyric poems set in the world of the urban street cop in Houston, the nation's fourth largest metropolis.In the patrol car, at scenes of suicides and DOAs, in the overtime reality of aching feet and sweating torsos, the reader experiences the hard realities and unexpected luminosities of doing America's most dangerous job.