Ana Castillo, an award winning poet, novelist, essayist, editor, playwright and translator, will teach a Memoir Writing workshop, at the Southwest Festival of the Written Word in Silver City, NM on Saturday, September 28th. It is open to anyone who wants to learn to write memoir. The workshop fee is $125 and enrollment is limited.
“In memoir, the reader must be persuaded that the narrator is writing honestly, whether or not he/she is secondary. It doesn’t matter as much ‘what happened’ as what you make of what you remember may have happened,” explains Ms. Castillo. She describes the workshop as a time for talking, laughing, crying, venting, and writing from the heart and mind. After that, she says, the participants will learn to get rid of all the sentimentality and leave on the page what is important to the reader to know about their memoirs. The workshop will consist of a number of exercises which will help the participants to know how to get started working on a memoir essay.
Ms. Castillo will also be the Southwest Festival of the Written Word’s opening speaker on Friday, Sept 27 from 5:00-6:30pm. Her keynote address is titled “Two New Books and How They Came to Be in an Anti-Print Age”. This event is free and open to the public.
Ana Castillo’s novel, Sapogonia, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is editor of La Tolteca, an arts and literary zine dedicated to the advancement of a world without borders and censorship and is on the advisory board of the new American Writers Museum in D.C. Castillo held the 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, among other teaching positions throughout her extensive career. Ana Castillo holds an M.A from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D., University of Bremen, Germany. In Fall, 2013 Ana Castillo will be teaching memoir writing in the MA/MFA writing program at Northwestern University in Chicago. The 20th anniversary edition of her classic book of Xicana essays, Massacre of the Dreamers will be released Fall 2014
She has also written several essays and columns for newspapers and magazines across the country on various topics such as the murder of Tejano singer, Selena; gender roles in the Farmworkers movement (Los Angeles Times, 4/20/97); being a mother (Salon, 4/12/99); and Feministas turning 50 (Oxygen). She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and the History Channel. In addition, she has also been featured along with Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chavez in Vanity Fair (9/94) and Hispanic (3/95).
The Southwest Festival of the Written Word will take place in Silver City NM from Friday September 27-Sunday September 29. All events at the Festival are free except for the Ana Castillo Memoir Writing workshop and the Festival Banquet on Saturday night with keynote speaker, Denise Chavez. The Workshop cost is $125 and the Banquet ticket cost is $30.
To register for the Memoir Writing Workshop, send an email to [email protected].
