"Talavera Series #1"
New Mexico - August 2020
Original Work
Image Size: 17" x 14" in
Framed Size: 25.75” x 28.75 x .5” in
Signed on the bottom right hand corner by the artist.
Comes with a certificate of authenticity.
Price includes framing.
About Ana Castillo:
Ana Castillo is a multilingual poet, novelist, essayist, editor, feminist theorist, playwright, translator, human rights and environmental activist and visual artist.
Castillo is a distinguished poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. She earned a BA in art from Northeastern Illinois University, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from the University of Bremen, Germany. She holds an honorary doctorate from Colby College. She is the editor of La Tolteca, a journal devoted to “promoting the advancement of a world without borders and censorship.”
Castillo’s commitment to human rights, free expression, and cultural exchange has shaped her career as a writer and scholar from the first. Calling her “the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists,” Commonweal contributor Ilan Stavans noted that Castillo’s “desire to find creative alternatives and to take risks is admirable.” Castillo’s work in poetry and prose is at once highly innovative and based on established oral and literary traditions.
Throughout her career, Castillo has continued to marry her art, painting on canvas in oils and acrylic, and then drawing, initially using tools at hand, a Sharpie black fine point and a journal. The writer’s proliferation has carried over into drawings as diverse in subject as her poetry and stories. Finally, the loves of the artist and prolific writer have merged, co-existing and even collaborating in Castillo’s new projects.
Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo credits the rich storytelling tradition of her Mexican heritage as the foundation for her writing. When she was nine years old, she wrote her first poems following the death of her grandmother. In high school and college Castillo was active in the Chicano movement, using poetry to advance political causes. Her first published volumes of verse—Otro canto (1977), The Invitation (1979), and Women Are Not Roses (1984)—“examine the themes of sadness and loneliness in the female experience,” according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Patricia De la Fuente. Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994; reprinted 2014), based on her doctoral work at the University of Bremen, likewise explores the Chicana experience and the historical and social implications of Chicana feminism. It is a “provocative” collection, according to Marjorie Agosin in the Multicultural Review, and the work of a writer both “lyrical and passionate,” and “one of the country’s most provocative and original.” Castillo has continued to write both poetry and prose that engage with the politics of identity, nation, and religion, notably in the anthology Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (1996), a collection of writings about the patron saint of Mexico that Castillo edited because “what we could call the feminine principle is too absent from—is too denigrated by—Western society,” as she noted in a Publishers Weekly interview. Castillo’s other collections of essays and nonfiction include My Mother’s Mexican: New and Collected Essays (2015) and Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (2016), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction and the International Latino Book Award.