Carlos E. Cortés

is a retired history professor who travels the world with his wife, Laurel, while lecturing on cruise ships, reviewing television scripts, giving talks and workshops on diversity, and performing his one-person autobiographical play, “A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage.” In Fourth Quarter:: Reflections of a Cranky Old Man, his first book of poetry, he reflects on the unpredictability and ironic twists of the past, present, and future from the perspective of an iconoclastic octogenarian now well into the “fourth quarter” of his life.