Anthony Barcellos Included in UNTAMED DREAMS

Award-winning California educator, science writer, and author Anthony Barcellos is included in a new anthology of immigrant stories from Portuguese Heritage Publications. Untamed Dreams: Faces of America is a 393-page compilation of real-life stories by several authors of Portuguese descent. The book was officially launched on Saturday, June 11, in conjunction with the Dia de Portugal celebration in San Jose.

Said Barcellos: "I was honored to have the opportunity to participate in Untamed Dreams. My father was a little boy when my grandparents brought their family to California from Terceira in the Azores, so I have always been aware of their bravery and sacrifice in building new lives here."

Barcellos's contribution to the book is a short memoir titled "The Book Collector." He pays tribute to his grandfather, who always helped him indulge his love of books. His father skillfully built a bookcase with glass doors in the family's living room, which Barcellos was later inspired to emulate with a bookcase of his own. The author's family had a long tradition of craftsmanship.

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 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. In April he received the MVPA literary award from the Society of Portuguese-American Students of Tulare's high schools.

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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