Lee & Low Books Acquires Cinco Puntos Press

Press Release

 

In major news for independent publishing, diversity-focused publisher Lee & Low Books has acquired the assets of El Paso-based Cinco Puntos Press. The acquisition brings together the lists of two award-winning independent publishers who are deeply respected for their commitment to a wide range of voices, and adds more than 130 titles to Lee & Low’s list. Lee & Low Books will become the publisher and primary distributor of all Cinco Puntos Press titles, which previously were distributed by Consortium.

 

Founded in 1985 by husband-and-wife team Bobby and Lee Byrd, Cinco Puntos Press began with a focus on local stories and voices. “When we first started, we looked to our friends and our neighborhood, El Paso and the U.S./Mexico Border,” says Bobby Byrd. Over time, he says, “our neighborhood expanded to include the cultural diversity of all human experience, but our books always have the picante taste of the border, its politics and rasquache ways.”

 

Over the course of its 36 years, Cinco Puntos Press published close to 130 books and received many awards and accolades, including the American Book Award for Excellence in Publishing, several publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an induction into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. Their list includes many beloved and award-winning titles, from Joe Hayes’s classic bilingual storybook La Llorona/The Weeping Woman, to PEN/Faulkner Award winner Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, to Morris Award winner Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero.

 

The acquisition marks a new stage of growth for Lee & Low Books, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary. Founded in 1991,  the company publishes diverse children’s books that are “about everyone, for everyone”–the company motto. Lee & Low Books is the largest multicultural children’s book publisher in the country, as well as one of the very few publishing companies in the United States owned by people of color. With the acquisition of Cinco Puntos Press, Lee & Low Books will expand its list to include its first adult titles, as well as significantly enlarging its collection of bilingual, Chicanx, and border literature.

 

Lee & Low plans to maintain Cinco Puntos Press titles under their own imprint, with the possibility of acquiring new titles under the imprint that align with Cinco Puntos’s mission and aesthetic. In addition, Lee & Low will become the publisher of several forthcoming Cinco Puntos Press titles, including Thirty Talks Weird Love by Alessandra Narváez Varela, which received a starred review from Booklist and will be released in October 2021; Where Wonder Grows, the follow-up picture book to the award-winning All Around Us by Xelena González and illustrated by Adriana M. Garcia, which received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly and will be published in January 2022 in both English and Spanish editions; and the adult literary thriller Nobody’s Pilgrims by award-winning author Sergio Troncoso, which will be published in May 2022.

 

Lee & Low also plans to reissue many Cinco Puntos Press books that are currently out of print, reflecting the company’s ongoing commitment to keeping diverse books in print for new generations of readers. “It is critical that a collection of strong diverse books like the ones that Cinco Puntos Press has published remain in print, and that is why these books were so important to us,” said Jason Low, publisher and co-owner of Lee & Low Books. Lee & Low Books previously acquired diverse children’s book publisher Children’s Book Press (CBP) in 2012 and Asia-focused publisher Shen’s Books in 2013, and has since brought nearly all of their titles back into print.

 

 

The Everything I Have Lost

By Sylvia Zéleny 

Publisher : Cinco Puntos Press

Language : English

Paperback : 256 pages

ISBN-10 : 194762718X

ISBN-13 : 978-1947627185

Reading age : 10 - 14 years

Julia comes of age in the murder capital of the world. Where is her father? Why are they shooting guns? Who are “they”?

Julia’s best friend is her diary. She calls it “My Everything” —twelve-years-old at its beginning and fifteen at the end— a girl at the beginning, a young woman at its end, knowing more than she ever wanted to know.

Julia tells her diary everything about growing up in Juárez. At first, her family loses their house and their car, then suddenly her father is making lots of money. The family has a new car and a new house. It doesn’t make sense. Her father’s gone a lot, and her mother is always distracted and worried, busy creating art and wondering where her husband is.

Life in Julia´s urban neighborhood is strange too: there are shootings in the middle of the street, cars and neighbors disappear, pet cats and entire homes are left behind. Girls are disappearing somewhere in the city. She hears people saying that drug cartels rule the streets, but who are they? She only knows that she and her brother can’t play outside. And she is becoming a young woman in the midst of this confusion and uncertainty.

She wants to move across the river to the United States where her aunt and cousins live. Julia writes about all this and about things she overhears, things she doesn’t quite understand, and things she simply tries not to think about. Then her father vanishes for real and Julia and her brother go to live with her aunt in El Paso. What’s happened to Dad? Will he come back? Nobody wants to answer. And Julia can only make lists of those things she loses.

Review

Foreword Review

The Everything I Have Lost captures a girl’s blossoming understanding of violence, family dysfunction, and what it means to grow up.

Booklist

Zéleny's lively novel, written in the form of a diary, captures Julia's voice perfectly as she matures. Julia's life is very different from most readers, but Zéleny's approachable, inviting writing makes it resonant on a broad scale.―Donna Scanlon

Publishers Weekly

Conveying the grim challenges Julia faces, Zéleny creates a fierce, funny, and full-of-feeling protagonist whose staccato diary entries pull the reader along.

Latinx In Publishing

Sylvia Zéleny makes her claim as one of the true contemporary voices to be heard on the US Mexican border. Her powerful stories are not to be missed and will hold canon for many young readers looking to identify with text for and by their own culture…The Everything I Have Lost is a beautifully sublime story of a young girl coming of age en la frontera.―Chelsea Villarreal

Sylvia Zéleny is a bilingual author from Sonora, México. Sylvia has published several short-story collections and novels in Spanish. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso where she is currently the Director of the Online Creative Writing MFA program. In 2016 she created Casa Octavia, a residence for women and LGBTQ writers from Latin America.

¡Si, Se Puede! / Yes, We Can!: Janitor Strike in L.A.

In support of Los Angeles Teachers

Written by Diana Cohn

Illustrated by Francisco Delgado

•             Age Range: 5 - 7 years
•             Grade Level: Kindergarten - 2
•             Paperback: 32 pages
•             Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press; Bilingual edition
•             Language: English, Spanish
•             ISBN-10: 093831789X
•             ISBN-13: 978-0938317890

Carlitos’ mother is a janitor. Every night, he sleeps while his mother cleans in one of the skyscrapers in downtown L.A. When she comes home, she waves Carlitos off to school before she goes to sleep. One night, his mamá explains that she can’t make enough money to support him and his abuelita the way they need unless she makes more money as a janitor. She and the other janitors have decided to go on strike.

Will he support her and help her all he can? Of course, Carlitos wants to help but he cannot think of a way until his teacher, Miss Lopez, explains in class how her own grandfather had fought for better wages for farmworkers when he first came to the United States. Finally, Carlitos knows how he can show his mamá how proud he is of her. He and the other children in his class make posters and Carlitos joins the marchers with a very special sign for his mom!

¡Sí, Se Puede! is a Jane Addams Peace Award Honor Book, a Skipping Stones Honor Book, as well as a selection for The Best of Beyond Difference, a recommended list of the top 10 diversity books published in 2002.

Diana Cohn, the author, is a social activist. As an elementary teacher, she discovered there were few books for children that discussed social issues, so she began to write as an avocation. She now works as Program Director for the Solidago Foundation, a foundation that supports communities working for economic and environmental justice. She lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.

Francisco Delgado, the illustrator, grew up in Juárez, Chihuahua, but completed high school in El Paso, Texas. He will -receive his MFA at Yale in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking in May 2002. Francisco is becoming known nationally for his political paintings that satirize U.S. icons blind to the mestizo and immigrant communities of Mexico. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Luis J. Rodriguez (Always Running) adds the afterword and a poem.

Two Cinco Puntos Press Titles in New Editions

Olor a perfume de viejita

By Claudia Guadalupe Martinez

Translated by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

Edited by Sylvia Zeleny

The classic Latinx growing up story, The Smell of Old Lady Perfume, now by popular demand in SPANISH!

Claudia Martinez’ novel for middle-grade readers is a bittersweet story about family, death and the resilient emotional strength of the human heart. Chela Gonzalez, the book’s narrator, is a nerd and a soccer player who can barely contain her excitement about starting the sixth grade. To Chela, her family is like a solar system, with her father the sun, and her mother, brothers and sister like planets rotating all around him. It’s the only world she fits in. But that universe is threatened when her strong father has a stroke. Chela’s grandmother moves in to help the family. The smell of her old lady perfume invades the house. That smell is worse than Sundays. Sundays were sad, but death is a whole other thing. In her grief and worry, Chela begins to discover herself and find her own strength.

Watch Out for Clever Women  

¡Cuidado con las mujeres astutas!

By legendary storyteller Joe Hayes

Illustrations by Vickie Trego Hill

A Bilingual Classic—Texas Bluebonnet Master List and Winner of the Southwest Book Award—with FIVE NEW STORIES. The book includes Joe’s signature story The Day It Snowed Tortillas.

According to an old saying, Una mujer piensa más en un solo minuto que un hombre en un mes entero—A woman thinks more in a minute than a man does in a whole month. For me, the saying refers to the rich inner life many women developed in Western cultures when so much of the external, active life was denied them. This collection of eleven Hispanic stories celebrates the strength of women that comes from this thinking.

My hope is that readers will find these stories spicy enough that they’ll begin to tell them themselves. And if they do, I invite them to add something from their own imaginations to make the stories even richer. —Joe Hayes

The Iron River

By Daniel Acosta

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press 
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1941026931
• ISBN-13: 978-1941026939

A river runs through young Manny Maldonado Jr.’s life, heart and imagination. Sometimes at night it even shoots through his brain like a bullet. But this river isn’t water, it’s iron—the tracks and trains of the Southern Pacific railroad that pass along his tight-knit neighborhood in the San Gabriel valley just ten miles east of L.A. The iron river is everything to Man-on-Fire, Man for short to his friends, Little Man to his uncles and cousins. He watches it, he waits for it, he plays nears its tracks, he listens for the weight of its currents (strong currents flowing east pulling two hundred boxcars, light current going west with less than fifty cars), he whiles away long summer days throwing rocks and bricks at it with his friends Danny, Marco and Little. They line up cans and bottles in mock battles to try to throw it off track. But nothing derails the iron river, and nothing stops the vicious stinking cop Turk from trying to pin a man's murder on the four young boys.

Starred Reviews

“A dense story with rich associative leaps, the novel will prompt discussions about race, class, sexuality, and gender.” —Kirkus Reviews

"An essential title for any library." —School Library Journal 

Daniel Acosta was born and grew up in California. After a half year as a novice in the Claretian order, Daniel left the seminary and enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. Following college, Daniel was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He was discharged from the Army in 1972 and returned to CSULA to earn his teaching credential. Daniel earned a Master’s Degree from CSULA and spent thirty-four years teaching English and creative writing at Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra, California. A former member of the L.A. Barrio Writer’s Workshop, Daniel retired from teaching in 2007 and returned to his writing. His fiction has appeared in national print and digital periodicals. Iron River is his debut novel. Daniel is the father of four. He and his wife, Linda, live in Rosemead, California.