Et Alia Press is holding our southeast Texas neighbors in our thoughts.

Hurricane Harvey’s intensity and destruction are all too familiar to Bruce Snow. On the eve of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall twelve years ago—Sunday, August 28, 2005—Bruce, his ill mother, uncle, uncle’s wife, and dog awaited Katrina in horror. A shortage of cash combined with a fierce loyalty to protect the Gentilly neighborhood family home purchased by his Ecuadorian immigrant grandparents led the then twenty-five-year-old author and his family to remain in their City to weather the storm, including enduring six days in the infamous Superdome.

About this day twelve years ago, Bruce writes,

“Satellite images of the multicolored, vicious swirl overlying the entire Gulf Coast were in my peripheral vision, but I wasn’t paying much attention. The sun filtering through the Venetian blinds of my grandparents’ home began to fade. It would be the last sunset of my old life. . . . I wandered my block in a catatonic stupor, nothing moving around me but the gentle breeze. Everyone was gone. Not just my friends, but everyone. The City had been emptied, and we were all alone. Our home, just a tiny island of light in the silent metropolis.”