Martha captures the spirit and vibrancy of our community in the most authentic, inspiring and thought provoking manner possible. By telling stories of struggle, perserverance and triumph, she breathes life into everyday joy human beings have at their fingertips when we listen to and value our life stories. Juan Salgado, M.U.P. President and CEO, Instituto del Progreso Latino This book inarguably pieces together the true spirit of the Mexican-American community, their struggles, their sense of family and their resolve to realize their dreams. Santiago Silva, Ph.D. LPC-S Clinical Professor (Ret.), University of Texas-Pan American In Dreaming Forward: Latino Voices Enhance the Mosaic, Martha Casazza not only tells the stories and describes the struggles of Latino students, she also provides a context that gives meaning to these stories and struggles. The themes that result from these stories represent concepts that will benefit every educator. Hunter Boylan, Ph.D. Director, National Center for Developmental Education, Appalachian State University

This book enriches the heart and inspires its readers to treasure life as it moves them from laughter to tears. It's a truly a breath of fresh air in stressful times.

With the publication of Looking Back and Dreaming Forward, Texas-born author PT Armstrong continues his exploration of the impact of race and racism upon individual American lives began with his first book, Sometimes It Was Beautiful, and the second, Frank and Mrs. Cahill. Looking Back and Dreaming Forward is composed of five personal memoir essays and one interview. Exactly as the book's title indicates, the author takes a hard uncompromising look at the pitfalls of racism in America with language which may be described as simple and down to earth. Of equal importance, if not greater, is the 91-year-old author's insistence that we have the ability to "make things better" and are well on our way to doing so.

A moving and powerful account of the problems faced by a new generation, from crime to poverty to an increasingly divided society, from an extraordinarily accomplished young activist and entrepreneur. My name is Jeremiah Emmanuel. I'm twenty years old. I'm an activist, an entrepreneur, a former deputy young mayor of Lambeth and member of the UK Youth Parliament. I wanted to change the world, but the world I was born into changed me first. Raised in south London, I lived in an area where crime and poverty were everywhere and opportunities to escape were rare. Violence was accepted, prison was expected. Your best friend might vanish overnight, never to be seen again. That was the world I knew; the only one I thought was possible for people like me. But somehow, as I got older, I found my way to a different world: a place where people listened to you, where opinions were heard, where doors were opened, where there were opportunities around every corner. Everything had stayed the same and everything had changed. This is the story of how I did it, the people who helped me get there, and the huge hurdles I - and my entire generation - have to learn to face and overcome. It's the story of how to move forward in a world that's holding you back.

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.