MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
February 19 – February 26, 2009 Edition
Author of Leaving
Glorytown to Appear
At B&N Book Launch
Memoir reveals struggles under Castro
Eduardo F. Calcines, author of the humorous and heartbreaking memoir, Leaving Glorytown, One Boy’s Struggle Under Castro, will appear at an official book launch party at 7 p.m., April 4 2009 at Barnes & Noble Carrollwood in Tampa, FL. Several hundred fans are expected to pack the event.
Leaving Glorytown, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, will be available in most bookstores and libraries on April 3. The work has already earned recognition in the publishing industry. The work has been named a Junior Library Guild Pick for 2009. In addition, the cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez has been picked from thousands of entries to be hung in the 51st annual Society of Illustrators Editorial and Book Exhibit, now through March 28 in New York City.
Barnes & Noble is donating up to 20% of the profits from nationwide pre-sales and sales of the book registered between April 2 and 6 to Calcines’s newly-created charity, The Faro-Lighthouse Youth Outreach Center, whose mission will be to inspire literacy and the love of reading.
Author Eduardo F. Calcines was a child of Fidel Castro’s Cuba; he was just three years old when Castro came to power in January 1959. After that, everything changed for his family and his country. When he was ten, his family applied for an exit visa to emigrate to America and he was ridiculed by his schoolmates and even his teachers for being a traitor to his country. But even worse, his father was sent to an agricultural reform camp to do hard labor as punishment for daring to want to leave Cuba. During the years to come, as he grew up in Glorytown, a neighborhood in the city of Cienfuegos, Eduardo hoped with all his might that their exit visa would be granted before he turned fifteen, the age at which he would be drafted into the army.
In this absorbing memoir, by turns humorous and heartbreaking, Eduardo Calcines recounts his boyhood and chronicles the conditions that led him to wish above all else to leave behind his beloved extended family and his home for a chance at a better future.
Calcines was born in Cuba in 1955 and immigrated to America at age fourteen. He is now a business owner, community activist, and news consultant. He lives in Tampa, Florida. This is his first book.
For more information about the book, visit FSG’s parent company MacMillan, at http://us.macmillan.com/leavingglorytown, or visit Eddy’s website at http://www.glorytown.net/
