American poet and author whose work explores themes of race, sexuality, and gender, especially as they relate to issues of power.

Castillo studied art education at Northeastern Illinois University (B.A., 1975), where she became involved in Hispanic American artistic, activist, and intellectual circles. Castillo's first collection of poems, Otro Canto (1977), was published as a chapbook. In 1979, shortly after receiving an M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago, she published a second chapbook, The Invitation, in which female speakers describe the experience of the erotic. Castillo's work draws on the sometimes contradictory political influences of militant ethnic and economic struggles and feminist and lesbian perspectives. Women Are Not Roses (1984), for example, explores the difficulties of poor and working-class women who must choose between devoting their energies to erotic relationships or to class struggle. Castillo characterized these arenas as feminine and masculine, respectively, and looked at how women claim their own sexuality as they negotiate between these conflicting desires. In The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Castillo continues her exploration of Latina women and their sexuality and examines the reactions of men in the Anglo and Latino communities. Written in an experimental form, the novel consists of letters sent over 10 years between two Latina women, arranged to be read in three different versions for three different types of readers: “The Conformist,” “The Cynic,” and “The Quixotic.”

Castillo wrote several collections of poetry, including Zero Makes Me Hungry (1975), My Father Was a Toltec (1988), I Ask the Impossible (2001), and Watercolor Women, Opaque Men (2005); the novels So Far from God (1993), Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), and The Guardians (2007); a collection of short stories, Loverboys (1996); a children's book, My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove (2000); and a collection of two plays, Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor (2005). She also coedited, with Cherríe Moraga, Esta puente, mi espalda: voces de mujeres tercermundístas en los Estados Unidos, the 1988 Spanish-language edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), and edited the anthology Goddess of the Americas (1996; in Spanish, La diosa de las Américas), about the Virgin of Guadalupe.