Mucho traffic and a stampede of plebes down below. Above all, Mulch. Mulch was what Palma Piedras called the wide and astonishingly ordinary middle class at the start of the twenty-first century.
Continue readingRecipient of International Latino Book Award in autobiography, LAMBDA award in best bisexual non-fiction. Paloma Negra,” Ana Castillo’s mother sings the day her daughter leaves home, “I don’t know if I should curse you or pray for you.” Growing up as the intellectually spirited daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family during the 1970s, Castillo defied convention as a writer and a feminist. A generation later, her mother’s crooning mariachi lyrics resonate once again. Castillo—now an…
Continue reading2006 Independent Publisher Book Award for Story Teller of the Year Reminiscent of the picaresque novel, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men contains episodes that range from the Mexican Revolution to modern-day Chicago and reflects a deep pride in Chicano culture and the hardships immigrants had to endure. “A shape shifting voice and earth shaking figures of her story: …the poetic structure of Castillo’s novel glides smoothly and compellingly in tercets…like some unstoppable force…” — BUY EBOOK “…Ana Castillo…
Continue readingPalma Piedras is forty-two, just divorced, and back in the U.S. after several years in Colombia, where her now ex-husband had tried to make her into a traditional South American wife while he plied the family (drug) trade. The grandmother who raised her while the parents she can’t remember picked produce in Southern California is dead (not that her being alive would have made much of a difference, since their relationship was at best irascible).…
Continue readingThe “I” in these critical essays by novelist, poet, scholar, and activist/curandera Ana Castillo is that of the Mexic-Amerindian woman living in the United States. The essays are addressed to everyone interested in the roots of the colonized woman’s reality. Castillo introduces the term Xicanisma in a passionate call for a politically active, socially committed Chicana feminism. In “A Countryless Woman, ” Castillo outlines the experience of the brown woman in a racist society that…
Continue readingBocaditos: Flash Fictions is Ana Castillo’s first chapbook in many years. Limited to 300 numbered and signed copies, this 40-page chapbook is printed on non-acidic, 80% post-consumer waste recycled paper, with a hand-sewn spine. A die-cut window in the cover reveals a self portrait painted by Ana Castillo. (Oil, mixed media on canvas.) As Ana writes in her Preface: “These are independent stories or excerpts from much longer ones that developed from my solitary life and…
Continue reading“Seductive … full of infectious vigor … these stories demand, above all, to be listened to.”―New York Times Book Review From Ana Castillo, the widely praised author of So Far from God and The Guardians, comes this collection of stories on the experience of love in all its myriad configurations. Infectiously moody and murderously comic, Castillo chronicles the rapturous beginnings, melancholy middles, and bittersweet endings of modern romance between men and women, men and men,…
Continue readingFrom American Book Award-winning author Ana Castillo comes a suspenseful, moving new novel about a sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent woman. Eking out a living as a teacher’s aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tía Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo’s father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst. After several…
Continue readingTeatro Vista Award winner Castillo turns her eye on the stage in this slender volume. Based on the author’s poem, “Like the People of Guatemala, I Want to be Free of These Memories,” (I ASK THE IMPOSSIBLE). Comprised of both a one-act and a two-act play, this powerful dramatic pairing centers on Sister Dianna Ortiz, who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured by U.S.-sponsored Guatemalan security forces in 1989. “Ana Castillo might be one of this…
Continue readingCherished for her passionate fiction and exuberant essays, the author hailed by Barbara Kingsolver in the L.A. Times as “Impossible to Resist,” returns to her first love, Poetry, to reveal an unwavering commitment to social justice, and a fervent embrace of the sensual world. With the poems in I Ask the Impossible, Castillo celebrates the strength that “is a woman?buried deep in [her] heart.” Whether memorializing real-life heroines who have risked their lives for humanity,…
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