Ana Castillo

Castillo, who is herself bisexual, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2015 for bisexual fiction with her book Give It to Me and another Lambda Literary Award in 2017 for bisexual nonfiction for Black Dove: Mama, Mi'jo, and Me. In 2018 she received the Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Oakland. Her papers are housed at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She was also nominated in 1999 for the "Greatest Chicagoans of the Century" sponsored by the Sun Times.

As a poet Castillo has authored several works, including Otro Canto (1977) The Invitation (1979), Women Are Not Roses (Arte Publico, 1984), and My Father Was a Toltec (West End Press, 1988). Her works primarily communicate the meaning and revelations we discover in various experiences. Her poem, Women Don't Riot, explores the tribulations of womanhood, but Castillo daringly uses the lines of this poem as her "offense, rejection" (line 49–50 of the poem) of the idea that she will sit quiet.

Ana Castillo (born June 15, 1953) is a Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Considered one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, Castillo is known for her experimental style as a Latina novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel Sapogonia was a 1990 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and her text So Far From God was a 1993 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of La Tolteca, an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including a 1987 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.

Castillo was born in Chicago in 1953, the daughter of Raymond and Rachel Rocha Castillo. Her mother was Mexican Indian and her father was born in 1933, in Chicago. She attended Jones Commercial High School and Chicago City College before completing her BS in art, with a minor in secondary education, at Northeastern Illinois University. Ana Castillo received her MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago in 1979, after teaching ethnic studies at Santa Rosa Junior College and serving as writer-in-residence for the Illinois Arts Council. She has also taught at Malcolm X Junior College and later on in her life at Sonoma State College. Instead of a traditional dissertation, she submitted the essays later collected in her 1994 work Massacre of the Dreamers. Castillo, who has written more than 15 books and numerous articles, is widely regarded as a key thinker and a pioneer in the field of Chicana literature. She has said, "Twenty-five years after I started writing, I feel I still have a message to share."