California Novelist Anthony Barcellos Featured in New Anthology

Award-winning California educator, science writer, and author Anthony Barcellos is included in a distinguished new anthology, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora, published this month by Boavista Press.

Said Barcellos, "It's exhilarating to find myself part of a collection that includes leading authors and poets I have been reading for years. Writers like Katherine Vaz and Frank X. Gaspar highlight these stories and poems by authors of Portuguese descent. I could hardly be more pleased to be in their company."

This anthology brings together contributions - fiction, poetry, memoirs - by some of the best contemporary writers in Canada and the United States to narrate the Portuguese experience in North America, focusing on the lived experiences, shared spaces and surviving traditions of one of the continent's most vibrant and productive immigrant populations.

Mid-Atlantic adventure

Barcellos's contribution to the book is a short story titled, "The Voyage to Brazil." It is a fictionalized version of a family story about the remarkable adventures of his great­great­grandfather, who is credited with repairing a steamboat when it was stranded in the mid­Atlantic. Said Barcellos: "I heard this story multiple times from my grandfather when I was a child, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to fill it out with imagined details and share it with others."

Award-winning author and educator

Dr. Anthony Barcellos holds a Ph.D. in math education from the University of California at Davis. He grew up speaking Portuguese on his grandfather's dairy farm in California's great Central Valley. His experiences inspired his classic novel, Land of Milk and Money (Tagus Press, 2012), the first volume in a planned trilogy tracking a full century in the lives of an immigrant family, inspired by his own childhood and ethnic roots in rural Tulare County.

About Land of Milk and Money, Gerald Haslam, author of The Great Central Valley, wrote: "One of the West's singular migrations - from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley - is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in what is for them a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read."

Excellence in teaching and writing

Barcellos currently resides in Davis, California, and is a senior faculty member of the mathematics department at American River College in Sacramento. He has received awards for teaching excellence at the University of California, Davis, and at American River College, where students selected him for Teacher of the Year. In 2014, he was selected for the American River College Patrons Chair Award.

Among his nonfiction titles is A Stroll through Calculus: A guide for the merely curious (Cognella, 2015) and he has won the prestigious George Pólya Award for expository excellence for his contribution to College Mathematics Journal, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America.

Anthony Barcellos's contributions as a young science reporter at the Albuquerque Journal, the largest newspaper in New Mexico, were circulated nationally. He later was an on-staff analyst and program officer for two of California's most important state elected officials and legislative innovators, Senator Albert Rodda of Sacramento and State Treasurer Jesse Unruh, who had been the most powerful Speaker of the Assembly in the state's history. Both men were supporters of some of the projects vital to the building of California's vast agricultural wealth and urban development, including the California State Water Project, a water storage and delivery system that is among the largest infrastructure projects in the world.

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