Assistant Professor of Southwest Studies Karen Roybal has co-edited “Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo,” the first edited collection that focuses on Chicana author Ana Castillo’s work.

For more than 40 years, Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenges borders around race, gender, and sexuality, critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Castillo’s work directly confronts what happens in response to cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing, and her contributions to Latinx cultural production and Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas. 

Divided into five sections, this collection, co-edited with Bernadine Hernández, assistant professor of American Literary Studies at the University of New Mexico, looks at Castillo’s poetics, language, and form, as well as thematic issues such as borders, immigration, gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism.

From Castillo’s first book of political poetry, “Otro Canto,” published in 1977, to her mainstream novels such as “The Mixquiahuala Letters,” “So Far from God,” and “The Guardians,” this collection aims to unravel how Castillo’s writing affects people of color around the globe and works in solidarity with other third world feminisms. “Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo” is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Roybal, who joined CC’s Southwest Studies faculty in 2016, holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico with specializations in Southwest Studies, Chicanx and Latinx literature and history, and Cultural Studies. Her courses focus on literature, arts and culture, archival studies, Southwest/Borderlands history, and environmental justice. Her earlier book, “Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848-1960,” was published by University of North Carolina Press in September 2017. Her articles have been published in Southwestern American Literature; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Culture, Theory and Critique; Chicana/Latina Studies, and IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning.