Jane Wong to discuss and sign 'Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City' at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 28 at Books on the Bosque

AT BOOKS ON THE BOSQUE

Jane Wong discusses and signs her debut memoir “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City” at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 28.

The Los Angeles Times said the memoir is a story of what you have and what you don’t, and is a love letter to Atlantic City and the Asian American working class. A review in the Washington Post said that Wong’s memoir “invites those who have been overlooked in America to hold up their verses, accolades and solidarity in a collective rejoinder to their detractors.” Wong is also the author of two poetry collections, “Overpour” and “How to Not Be Afraid of Everything.” Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2015. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.

Books on the Bosque is located at 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane NW.

Jane Wong to discuss and sign 'Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City' at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 28 at Books on the Bosque

AT COLLECTED WORKS

Tobe Bott-Lyons and Hanna Levin will be in conversation with Patricia Trujillo, New Mexico’s deputy secretary of higher education, about the book “Race and Rurality: Considerations for Advancing Higher Education Equity” at 6 pm. Monday, Jan. 22, at Collected Works.

Bott-Lyons and Levin contributed articles to the book.

The bookstore is located at 202 Galisteo St., downtown Santa Fe.

A BOOK OF LETTERS

“Dearest Darling, Letters from World War II,” a heartwarming memoir-love story of Navy aerial photographer Anthony Libro Porto and his bride, has been published. Porto wrote the letters, with a secret code embedded, to Bernice Hardey, his girlfriend and then his wife. The long flow of letters started when he was at the Navy School of Photography in Pensacola, Florida, and continued when he attended the Navy Motion Picture School in Anacostia, Washington, D.C., the Naval Air Station in San Diego, and finally on board the escort carrier USS Saginaw Bay in the Pacific during the final battles of the war.

After the war, the couple lived in Los Alamos.

Their daughter-in-law, Catherine Emerson Porto of Albuquerque, organized the letters into the book “Dearest Darling.” She thanked her late sister-in-law, Nancy Porto Hand, for saving the box of letters. As Emerson Porto writes in the book’s introduction, “Tony’s letters, masterfully written, provide a window into a beautiful World War II love story, a story of two people from diverse backgrounds, far from home, doing their part for a cause much larger than themselves. … More importantly, the letters reveal relational building blocks that culminated in a lifetime of love, faith and service to each other, to humankind, to country and to God.”

— Compiled by David Steinberg/For the Journal