CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED WRITER ANA CASTILLO TO READ OCT. 6

photo by Iwona Biederman

Author Ana Castillo, long considered one of the leading voices to emerge from the Mexican-American experience, will give a reading at Bryn Mawr College on Thursday, Oct. 6, at 7:30 p.m. in Thomas Great Hall.

Free and open to the public, Castillo's reading is part of the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, which features award-winning poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights.

Hailed by author Ilan Stavans as "the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists," Castillo is a prolific, critically acclaimed writer, whose work is widely anthologized in the United States and abroad. 

Since her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award, Castillo has written several works of fiction and nonfiction, including Peel My Love Like an Onion and So Far From God, which earned her both the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction in 1993 and the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Award in 1994. Her forthcoming works include Psst … I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: Two Plays by Ana Castillo, which concerns the torture and rape of the American Sister Dianna Ortiz in Guatemala. Also due out this fall is a novel, Watercolor Women/Opaque Men, the story of a single, working mother, the daughter of Chicano migrant workers, and her struggles for upward mobility. Booklist editor Donna Seaman has called this novel in verse "… unsparing in its outrage and compassion."

Castillo is also the author of a collection of essays titled Massacre of the Dreamers: Reflections on Mexican-Indian Women in the United States 500 Years After the Conquest and the editor of an anthology on the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Diosa de las Americas/Goddess of the Americas. Her volumes of poetry include My Father Was a Toltec, I Ask the Impossible and Women Are Not Roses.

Born and educated in Chicago, Castillo was a community activist throughout the 1970s. During that time, she taught English as a second language and Mexican and Mexican-American history in community colleges in Chicago and San Francisco. She later taught fiction writing and Latina literature at the University of New Mexico, Mills College and Mount Holyoke College. Castillo is currently a visiting writer in creative writing and fiction at DePaul University.

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