Joy Castro

Born in Miami, Joy Castro studied at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and at Texas A&M University . She taught for ten years at Wabash College in Indiana, where she offered courses on Latino/a, Asian American, and African American literature, women's literature, literary modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, fiction writing, creative nonfiction writing, and race, class, and gender issues. An award-winning teacher, she publishes articles on innovative strategies for the post-secondary classroom, and her literary scholarship focuses on experimental women writers of the twentieth century such as Jean Rhys, Margery Latimer, Meridel Le Sueur, Sandra Cisneros, and Naomi Shihab Nye. Committed to broadening the reach of higher education to communities in need, she has offered free courses to at-risk teenagers, low-income adults, retirees, and victims of domestic violence. Her honors include the Charles Gordone Award for Poetry and a Frank B. Vogel Scholarship in nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poems appear in anthologies and in journals such as North American Review, Cream City Review, Chelsea, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, and the New York Times Magazine. Her critically acclaimed memoir The Truth Book ( Arcade , 2005) investigates intersections of ethnicity, gender, class, religion, violence, and the body. In addition to serving on the faculty in the Institute for Ethnic Studies and the Department of English at UNL, she teaches in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Boston.
Personal website: http://www.joycastro.com