Ana Castillo  

Ana Castillo, Speaker
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
1:40 p.m.
NEIU Recital Hall
Free to the public.

Ana Castillo is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist.  Born and raised in Chicago, she is considered a leading voice from the Chicana experience. Castillo is a prolific author whose work has been critically acclaimed and widely anthologized in the United States and abroad. Ilan Stavans writes, “She is the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists.” Michael Sinayerson writes in Vanity Fair that her essays “make the case for a new, agggressive brand of feminism she calls Xicanisma, to win brown women a place in a black-and-white country.”

Castillo received her education in Chicago. After graduating from Jone’s Commercial High School, she attended Chicago City College for two years before enrolling at Northeastern Illinois University, where she received a B.A. in 1975, majoring in Art and minoring in Secondary Education. She holds an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Bremen, Germany.

Castillo resides in New Mexico. She has one son, Marcel Ramón Herrera.

The NEIU Library is pleased to carry numerous works by Ana Castillo. Please visit the NEIU Library Catalog for a complete listing.

I Ask the Impossible - One copy on order

Castillo's poetry celebrates the strength that "is a woman, buried deep in [her] heart." She shares over twelve years of poetic inspiration, from her days as a writer who "once wrote poems in a basement with no heat," through the tenderness of motherhood and bitterness of loss, to the strength of love itself, which can "make the impossible a simple act."

Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma

Call Number: E184.M5 C369 1995

The essays are addressed to everyone interested in the roots of the colonized woman's reality. Essays on the Watsonville strike, the early Chicano movement, and the roots of machismo illustrate the extent to which women still struggle against male dominance. Other essays suggest strategies for opposing the suppression of women's spirituality and sexuality by institutionalized religion and the state.

The Mixquiahuala Letters

Call Number: PS3553.A8135 M59 1992

Castillo’s first novel focuses on the friendship between two strong and fiercely independent Hispanic women. An examination of Mexican and Hispanic forms of love and gender conflict and the role that female friendships play within it.

My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973-1988

Call Number: PS3553.A8135 M9 1995

Whether invoking her origins as the daughter of a street warrior and a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, or defining her own lyrical positions on a variety of social, political, sexual, and aesthetic issues, Castillo's poetic voice is unmistakably her own.

Peel My Love Like an Onion

Call Number: PS3553.A8135 P44 2000

A novel about Carmen, a plucky flamenco dancer in Chicago. It follows her rise to fame despite a crippled leg from polio. Then it charts her descent as the polio returns, her two lovers abandon her, and she is reduced to working in a sweatshop. But Carmen will recoup.

Sapogonia: (an Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter)

Call Number: PS3553.A8135 S27 1990

In her second novel, Castillo examines the obsessive struggle between a man and a woman, two natives of the metaphorical country of Sapogonia. In their battle for control over each other, the author subtly defines the struggle of all mestizos--the conflict of a mixed heritage of Conquistador and Conquered--which can never be resolved.

So Far from God: A Novel

Call Number: PS3553.A8135 S65 1993

The story of two crowded decades in the life of a Chicana family. While mother Sofia struggles to hold the family together in the wake of her husband's disappearance, daughters Esperanza, Caridad, and Fe seek self-fulfillment in radical politics, careers, sex, and spirituality.

Watercolor Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse

Call Number: PS3553.A8135 W38 2005

The story of a single, working mother, the daughter of Chicano migrant workers, and her struggles for upward mobility. The main character, Ella -- or "She"-- moves toward establishing her sexual identity and finding her rightful place in the world while simultaneously raising her son to be independent and self-sufficient.