Palabra Pura: Calling Home

Our monthly bilingual reading series in September features Ana Castillo and Paul Martinez Pompa and is curated by Cristina Correa. The event is hosted and co-presented by the Poetry Foundation.

States Correa, “Across generations, Latino writers and their constellation of experiences and creative identities have found a home in Chicago. For many, home is a constant migration between places and memories. For others, home is a space in which their productions are collected and honored: museums, bookcases, stages. Home is often a multi-faceted location, both physical and spiritual, that occurs when we can recognize ourselves in it. It is a place that facilitates growth and exchange. As a powerhouse of intellectual honesty in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Chicago-born and raised Ana Castillo provides the illuminating force for this conversation with home. Her fearless cultural and linguistic presence has provided a source of home for other writers interested in maintaining honest and critical dialogue with the places they come from.”

About the Artists:

Ana Castillo is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Castillo was born and raised in Chicago. She has contributed to periodicals and on-line venues (Salon and Oxygen) and national magazines, includingMore and the Sunday New York Times. Castillo’s writings have been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations and publications. Among her award winning, best sellling titles: novels include So Far From God, The Guardians and Peel My Love like an Onion, among other poetry: I Ask the Impossible. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and the History Channel and was a radio-essayist with NPR in Chicago. Ana Castillo is editor of La Tolteca, an arts and literary ‘zine dedicated to the advancement of a world without borders and censorship and on the advisory board of the new American Writers Museum in D.C. Castillo held the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University, The Martin Luther King, Jr Distinguished Visiting Scholar post at M.I.T. and was the Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College in Utah in 2012, among other teaching posts throughout her extensive career. Ana Castillo holds an M.A from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D., University of Bremen, Germany in American Studies and an honorary doctorate from Colby College. 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. Dr. Castillo’s So Far From God and Loverboys are two titles on the banned book list controversy with the TUSD in Arizona. 2013 Recipient of the American Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Prize to an independent scholar. Dr. Castillo will hold the Lund-Gil Endowed Chair at Dominican University (IL) in 2014.

Paul Martinez Pompa is the author of My Kill Adore Him (University of Notre Dame Press 2009) and is a recent recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. He teaches composition and poetry at Triton College and lives in Chicago.

About the Curator:

Cristina Correa is a VONA/Voices writer and a Midwestern Voices and Visions awardee. Her work has recently been published in TriQuarterly, broadcast on National Public Radio’s Latino USA, and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is an MA candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About Our Co-Presenter:

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.