Ana Castillo: 1953—: Novelist, Poet, and Essayist

Castillo's second novel, Sapogonia, was also published by Bilingual Review, but the giant Doubleday/Anchor publishing house acquired the rights to both books after the success of Castillo's next book, So Far from God (1993), which was published by another major firm, W.W. Norton. So Far from God, seen by some as taking its structure from the popular Latin American telenovela television soap operas, was a kaleidoscopic story of the experiences of a Latin American matriari-arch and her four daughters. Incorporating folklore, magical episodes, recipes, and vivid scenes of Mexican-Amerian life, the book brought Castillo a new level of fame.

Although she had earned a living through a series of academic appointments (and finished a Ph.D. degree at the University of Bremen in Germany in 1991), Castillo now began to write full-time. One new fruit of her labors was the story collection Loverboys (1996), which was generally positively reviewed and dealt with a large variety of romantic and erotic relationships, heterosexual and homosexual. Massacre of the Dreamers (the title refers to an episode from Mexico's pre-Columbian history) was based on materials from her Ph.D. thesis, but incorporated unusual creative elements within the essay form. Castillo also edited several collections of writings by other Latin American authors, one of them dealing with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Castillo has renounced the Catholic religion, but, she told Melus in 1997, "Catholicism is embedded in our culture, in our psyche."