MY BOOK OF THE DEAD paints a vivid panorama, a contemporary Hieronymus Bosch triptych in breathtaking magnificence because of Castillo’s skill, her ear, her vision, and her courage. Infused with passion, lyricism, and magical realism, Castillo makes us laugh and cry and speaks truth we need to hear.
Continue readingDrawings by Castillo are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. MY BOOK OF THE DEAD is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.
Continue readingFor more than forty years, Chicana author Ana Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenge borders around race, gender, and sexuality; and critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Her contributions to Latinx cultural production and to Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas.
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Continue readingMucho 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…
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