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In celebration of Latinx Heritage Month, �԰����� has joined with Gemini Ink to host a book reading and a writing workshop with renowned Chicana writer Ana Castillo at the end of September. The theme of �԰�����’s 2018 Latinx Heritage Month is “Chicana/Latina Autobiography.”

On Friday, Sept. 28, Castillo will read from her memoir, Black Dove, Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me. A reception will be held beforehand at 6 p.m., with the reading beginning at 6:30 p.m., in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall. The following day, Saturday, Sept. 29, Castillo will hold a writing workshop at 10 a.m. in the Holt Center.

Castillo's work as a poet, dramatist, fiction writer, and essayist has earned her an international reputation as a committed and engaged public intellectual. She held the inaugural Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. Numerous awards attest to her contributions as a writer: the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters; the Carl Sandburg Award; the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award; writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry; and the Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in her hometown of Chicago. Castillo edits La Tolteca, an arts and literary magazine. In her latest work, Black Dove, Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, Castillo looks at what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police brutality. The Chicago Sun-Times writes of Castillo, “An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in…humor, love, suspense and heartache—that draw the reader in.”