For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world--the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency--and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.

«Ana Castillo es un tesoro estadounidense. Temeraria, compasiva y absolutamente brillante: es la escritora que necesitamos mientras enfrentamos los retos de nuestro mundo cambiante». --Tayari Jones, autora de Un matrimonio americano «Ana Castillo es una narradora de primera». --Julia �lvarez, escritora galardonada La leyenda literaria Ana Castillo explora los secretos ocultos de los hogares y las mujeres a quienes más impactan en esta colección que cimienta su lugar como una voz destacada de la ficción feminista. Katia, la primera en su tradicional familia mexicoestadounidense en terminar la secundaria, entra a la edad adulta en una época de cambios turbulentos. En todo el país, los jóvenes luchan por los derechos civiles y de las mujeres, y protestan contra la Guerra de Vietnam y las brutales dictaduras de América del Sur. Como muchos de su generación, Katia quiere hacer del mundo un lugar mejor y está decidida a seguir su propio camino. Mientras considera mudarse a California para unirse a La Causa --movimiento del activista mexicoestadounidense César Chávez para mejorar las condiciones laborales de los trabajadores rurales migrantes--, Katia recibe un regalo inesperado de su padre: un boleto de avión a la Ciudad de México. "Tráete a tu madre, le dice, sus hijos la necesitan". Así que, Katia se une a su causa para traer a Tina de regreso a Chicago. Pero no será fácil. Katia debe aprender a sortear una versión liberada de su madre en un nuevo país, donde supuestamente se dedica a la venta ambulante de productos de limpieza de alta calidad llamados Donna Crean Well. Desde Chicago a México y a Nuevo México, los relatos de Doña Cleanwell deja su hogar iluminan a un grupo de personas cuyas historias nos dejaran sin aliento. "Ana Castillo is an American treasure. Fearless, compassionate, and flat-out brilliant--she is the writer we need as we navigate the challenges of our ever-changing world."--Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage "Ana Castillo is de primera storyteller."--award-winning author Julia Alvarez Literary legend Ana Castillo explores the secrets that are kept within households and the women they impact the most in this breakout collection that cements her place as a leading voice in feminist fiction. The first person in her traditional Mexican American family to graduate from high school, Katia is entering adulthood at a time of turbulent change. Across the nation young people are fighting for civil and women's rights and protesting the Vietnam War and brutal dictatorships in South America. Like so many of her generation, Katia wants to make the world a better place, and is determined to follow her own path. As she considers moving to California to join La Causa, Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez's movement to improve the working conditions of migrant farmer workers, Katia receives an unexpected gift from her father: a plane ticket to Mexico City. Bring back your mother, he says, tell her, her children need her. And so Katia joins this cause, to get Tina back to Chicago. But it won't be easy. Katia must learn to navigate a liberated version of her mother in a new country where she is now hawking supposedly superior cleaning products, called Donna Clean Well. Katia is but one of the voices introduced in this dazzling collection of short fiction from revered writer Ana Castillo. Spanning from Chicago to Mexico to New Mexico, the stories in Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home illuminate a chorus of people whose stories will leave you breathless.

Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

This new edition of an immensely influential book gives voice to Mexic Amerindian women silenced for hundreds of years by the dual censorship of being female and indigenous. Castillo replaced the term "Chicana feminism" with "Xicanisma" to include mestiza women on both sides of the border. In history, myth, interviews, and ethnography Castillo revisits her reflections on Chicana activism, spiritual practices, sexual attitudes, artistic ideology, labor struggles, and education-related battles. Her book remains a compelling document, enhanced here with a new afterword that reexamines the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

From Ana Castillo, the widely praised author of So Far from God and The Guardians, comes this collection of stories on the experience of love in all its myriad configurations. Infectiously moody and murderously comic, Castillo chronicles the rapturous beginnings, melancholy middles, and bittersweet endings of modern romance between men and women, men and men, and women and women.

Mixing the lyrical with the colloquial, the tender with the tough, Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of uncompromising commitment and passion. My Father Was a Toltec" "is the sassy and street-wise collection of poems that established and secured Castillo's place in the popular canon. It is included here in its entirety along with the best of her early poems.
Ana Castillo's poetry speaks--in English and Spanish--to every reader who has felt the pangs of exile, the uninterrupted joy of love, and the deep despair of love lost.

An Anchor Books Original

Cherished for her passionate fiction and exuberant essays, the author hailed by Julia Alvarez as ?una storyteller de primera,? and by Barbara Kingsolver in The Los Angeles Times as ?impossible to resist,? returns to her first love?poetry?to reveal an unwavering commitment to social justice, and a fervent embrace of the sensual world.

With the poems in I Ask the Impossible, Castillo celebrates the strength that "is a woman?buried deep in [her] heart." Whether memorializing real-life heroines who have risked their lives for humanity, spinning a lighthearted tale for her young son, or penning odes to mortals, gods, goddesses, Castillo?s poems are eloquent and rich with insight. She shares over twelve years of poetic inspiration, from her days as a writer who ?once wrote poems in a basement with no heat," through the tenderness of motherhood and bitterness of loss, to the strength of love itself, which can ?make the impossible a simple act." Radiant with keen perception, wit, and urgency, sometimes erotic, often funny, this inspiring collection sounds the unmistakable voice of a "woman on fire? / and more worthy than stone."

Loverboys is the award-winning author Ana Castillo's stunning collection of twenty-three stories that depict the wildly varied faces of love, from rapturous beginnings to bittersweet endings. From the regret-tinged soulfulness of the title story in which a woman reminisces about a former lover, to the down-and-dirty settling of scores in "Vatolandia" to the high-spirited comedy of "La Miss Rose," about a West Indian fortuneteller on a mission to help the lovelorn, Ana Castillo bares the secret hearts of women and men. By turns hopeful, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Loverboys is an irresistible pairing of author and subject. In prose that is at once erotic and eloquent, streetwise and surreal-in a voice like no other in recent literary fiction-Ana Castillo covers the waterfront of modern romance and proves why she is, in the words of Julia Alvarez, "a first-rate storyteller."

In Sapogonia, edited and revised for its Anchor publication, Ana Castillo confronts the complex issues of race and identity facing those of mixed heritage through the struggles of M&#225ximo Madrigal, an expatriate of Sapogonia, the metaphorical homeleand of all mestizos. Subtly political, it demonstrates how warring blood within a single body resists any peaceful resolution.

From American Book Award-winning author Ana Castillo comes a suspenseful, moving novel about a sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent woman. Eking out a living as a teacher's aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tia Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo's father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst.
After several days of waiting and with an ominous phone call from a woman who may be connected to a smuggling ring, Regina and Gabo resolve to find Rafa. Help arrives in the form of Miguel, an amorous, recently divorced history teacher; Miguel's gregarious abuelo Milton; a couple of Gabo's gangbanger classmates; and a priest of wayward faith. Though their journey is rife with challenges and danger, it will serve as a remarkable testament to family bonds, cultural pride, and the human experience
Praise for "The Guardians"
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY "THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE"
"An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache-that draw the reader in."
-"Chicago Sunday Sun-Times"
"A rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking . . . This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience."
"-Los Angeles Times"
"What drives the novel is its chorus of characters, all, in their own way, witnesses and guardian angels. In the end, Castillo's unmistakable voice-earthy, impassioned, weaving a 'hybrid vocabulary for a hybrid people'-is the book's greatest revelation."
"-Time Out New York"
"A wonderful novel . . . Castillo's most important accomplishment in "The Guardians" is to give a unique literary voice to questions about what makes up a 'family.' "
"-El Paso Times"
"A moving book that is both intimate and epic in its narrative."
-Oscar Hijuelos, author of "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love "

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology weaves together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor through an intersectional lens. Contributors provide narratives that make feminized labor visible and that prioritize collective action and holistic healing for mother-scholars of color, their children, and their communities within and outside academia. The volume is organized in four parts: (1) separation, migration, state violence, and detention; (2) Chicana/Latina/WOC mother-activists; (3) intergenerational mothering; and (4) loss, reproductive justice, and holistic pregnancy. Contributors offer a just framework for Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies to thrive within and outside of the academy. They describe a new interpretation of motherwork that addresses the layers of care work needed for collective resistance to structural oppression and inequality. This anthology is a call to action for justice. Contributions are both theoretical and epistemological, and they offer an understanding of motherwork through Chicana and Women of Color experiences.

Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book collects work by writers who spent their formative years in the region to ask: What characterizes a Chicago author? Is it a certain feel to the writer's language? A narrative sensibility? The mention of certain neighborhoods or locales? While the authors represented here write from distinct local experiences, some universals emerge, including the abiding influence of family and friends and the self-realizations earned against the background of a place sparkling with promise and riven by inequality, a place in constant flux. The stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman's experience with sexual assault to a child's foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.

2006 Independent Publisher Book Award for Story Teller of the Year In this updated edition of Ana Castillo's celebrated novel in verse, featuring a new introduction by Poet Laureate of Texas Carmen Tafolla, we revisit the story's spirited heroine, known only as "Ella" or "She," as she takes us through her own epic journey of self-actualization as an artist and a woman. With a remarkable combination of tenderness, lyricism, wicked humor, and biting satire, Castillo dramatizes Ella's struggle through poverty as a Chicano single mother at the threshold of the twenty-first century, fighting for upward mobility while trying to raise her son to be independent and self-sufficient. Urged on by the gods of the ancients, Ella's life interweaves with those of others whose existences are often neglected, even denied, by society's status quo. Castillo's strong rhythmic voice and exploration of such issues as love, sexual orientation, and cultural identity will resonate with readers today as much as they did upon the book's original publication more than ten years ago. This expanded edition also includes a short preface by the author, as well as a glossary, a reader's guide, and a list of additional suggested readings.