Carol Potenza

New Mexico Mysteries

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Carol Potenza

The Tony Hillerman Prize

Happy New Year! On January 2nd, 2018, Minotaur Books closed its Tony Hillerman Prize for the Best First Mystery set in the Southwest Competition for the year. The prize is sponsored by St. Martin’s Press and Western Writers of America. Dozens of authors submit books, but that doesn’t mean a submission will be chosen. Since the inception of the contest in 2006, no prize was given in three of the years, but it has been awarded to some very talented debut authors. https://www.hillermanprize.com/page2 St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur books run two other writing competitions: First Crime Novel Competition sponsored by Minotaur Books …

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Sundays in fall mean football–and writing

A few years ago, my son set up a Fantasy Football league and invited his dad and cousin and a bunch of his friends to participate. I’ve never really looked at the rules, but the members of this league hold a draft and choose NFL players–quarterbacks, running-backs, wide receivers, kickers–and earn points in head to head games with other members of the league as the games are played in real time. For example, for every ten yards passing, a quarterback receives a point. If the quarterback throws a pass for a touchdown, he get four points. At the end of …

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With the fall comes rattlesnakes

Let’s talk about rattlesnakes. Fall is here and the temperatures have dropped in New Mexico. It’s even froze and snowed in the northern part of the state. Evenings, nights and mornings are much cooler, but the daytime temperatures can still reach into the eighties and nineties. This is the time of year to find snakes in neighborhoods. Why? Because asphalt, blacktop and rock walls soak in the warmth of the sun all day long and are magnets for cold blooded reptiles as the air cools off at night. We found a rattlesnake—the first one we’ve seen all year—on top of …

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Ancestry and Origins: Update

For my husband’s birthday, I decided to get us both DNA ancestry kit. When it ar rived, we spit in a tube and sent it off to the company. Within weeks, we had our genetic ancestry laid out in a pie chart. My results weren’t a surprise. My father’s family was easily traced to southern Italy, around the Naples area. In fact, there is a city in the arch of the boot called Potenza. Forty percent of my DNA was ‘Italian of Greek’. My mother’s family had been in the United States, probably even before the Revolutionary War, for generations, …

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