Tired, Hungry, and Standing in One Spot for Twelve Hours ─ Essential Cop Essays

Over twenty years ago, Sarah Cortez left a flourishing corporate career to strap on a gun, and police the streets. Transitioning from designer heels and a high-rise office to a low-bid, agency-owned Crown Vic wasn’t easy, but it delivered exactly what she desired. In these highly-charged personal reflections, Cortez reveals the complicated machinery of a cop’s heart, mind, and soul by dissecting the differences between cops and civilians. A must-read to understand the intangibles demanded by policing—courage, determination, patience, and a belief in justice—despite the grimy backdrop where life can become death in an instant.

Sarah Cortez, Councilor of the Texas Institute of Letters, is published in Texas Monthly, Rattle, Sun, Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, Arcadia, Midwest Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature. Her writing has received awards from PEN Texas, Writers’ League of Texas, Los Angeles Book Festival, and PEN Southwest. Her anthologies have won a Southwest Book Award and ILBAs.? Her recent anthology, Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials, is a 2016 Southwest Book of the Year. She lives in Houston, Texas.