Ana Castillo

Ana Castillo is one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Chicana literature. She is the author of So Far From God and Sapogonia, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, as well as The Guardians, Peel My Love like an Onion, and many other books of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her newest novel, Give It to Me, won a 2014 LAMBDA Literary Award; her collection, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma was re-released as a 20th anniversary edition in November 2014; and the award-winning Watercolor Women, Opaque Men was re-released in a new edition in the fall of 2016 by Northwestern University Press.

Castillo's teaching posts have included the Bread Loaf program with Middlebury College, the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Visiting Scholar post at MIT, the Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College (UT), and the Lund-Gil Endowed Chair at Dominican University (IL) . Other awards include a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, and the Lifetime Achieve Award by Latina 50 Plus.