Ana Castillo -- anacastillo.com -- Bio

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Ana Castillo is born in Chicago. Four days later the Rosenbergs are executed. The next month the Korean "conflict" ceases. Later that summer there is a huge race riot in Chicago in protest of integrated housing. One thousand cops are sent to the Trumball Park apartments. University of Chicago archeologists unearth a 10,000 year-old Native American settlement in Prairie du Rocher, Illinois.

Eisenhower is president. The U.S. Immigration Service arrests and deports over 3.8 million Mexicans and Chicanos during Operation Wetback (which continues until 1958) including political activist Luisa Moreno and other Chicano leaders.

Civil rights actions escalate. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins sit-ins in Baltimore. Blacks begin a bus boycott in Baton Rouge. McCarthyism runs rampant. The Screen Actors Guilds bans communists from membership. Dylan Thomas dies. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit becomes the first woman and first Indian to head the United Nations. Christine Jorgensen is a press darling because of her sex change operation from "George" performed in Denmark the previous year. Ella Fitzgerald is voted Downbeat's most popular musician.

There is no Pulitzer Prize for fiction but a boom in the publication of books by black Americans including:

Maud Martha -- Gwendolyn Brooks (also a Chicagoan)
Go Tell It On the Mountain -- James Baldwin
Simple Takes a Wife -- Langston Hughes
The Outsider -- Richard Wright (who migrated to Chicago in 1927)

And Ralph Ellison wins the National Book Award for The Invisible Man!

    I cannot say I am a citizen of the
    world as Virginia Woolf, speaking
    as an Anglo woman born to economic
    means, declared herself; nor can I
    make the same claim to U.S.
    citizenship as Adrienne Rich does
    despite her universal feeling for
    humanity. As a mestiza born to
    the lower strata, I am treated at
    best, as a second class citizen,
    at worst as a non-entity.¹

Poet/novelist/artist/xicanista Ana Castillo lives in her hometown of Chicago with her son. Her latest work is a collection of poetry, I Ask the Impossible. Her latest novel published in the fall of 1999, is Peel My Love Like an Onion. She has also written a children's book My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove. A Spanish language version of the collection of essays she edited on Guadalupe-Tonantzin, Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa De Las Américas : Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, was published in August 2000 by Viking.

Castillo's work is included in several anthologies such as MASCARAS (Third Women Press, 1997); Tributes: American Writers on American Writers (Bard College, 1997); and MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (Viking, 1997).

She has also written several essays and columns for newspapers and magazines across the country on various topics such as the murder of Tejano singer, Selena; gender roles in the Farmworkers movement (Los Angeles Times, 4/20/97); being a mother (Salon, 4/12/99); and Feministas turning 50 (Oxygen.com). She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and the History Channel. In addition, she has also been featured along with Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chavez in Vanity Fair (9/94) and Hispanic (3/95).

She received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters. Her other awards include a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry. She was also awarded a 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.

Castillo is constantly in demand for speaking and reading engagements across the country as well as around the world. She has been invited to speak in Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and several other countries in Europe and the Caribbean. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum has twice hosted book launches for her.

For the city of Chicago's immense Year 2000 party "Chicago Welcomes the World", Castillo was among the many featured "hometown" artists including Gwendolyn Brooks, Buddy Guy, Studs Terkel and Kurt Elling that performed or read on New Year's Eve for a gala party at McCormick Place.

In April 2000, Castillo was honored with other notable Chicagoans including blues legend Buddy Guy with a reception to launch a city history mural on the 103^rd floor of the world famous Skydeck of the Sears tower. She is featured along with Terkel, Brooks and Carl Sandberg in a section that honors writers from the city.

Currently, Castillo teaches in the English Department at DePaul University in Chicago. She has also recently completed another novel and is preparing to release another volume of poetry.

For other biographies of Castillo, visit the web site of the Ana Castillo Papers at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the Ana Castillo web page at Voices from the Gap.

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¹From "A Countryless Woman: The Early Feminista" Massacre of the Dreamers. (p.21)