Sandra M. Castillo is a Cuban-American writer whose work explores issues of memory, history, gender, and language, but it reflects a personal vision, tied primarily by history, personal and otherwise. She depicts contradictory worlds, the memory of a homeland and memory politics while examining the ordinary reality of exile as well as the duality of existence. Her first trip back to the island of her birth in 1994 provided the impetus for her collection entitled My Father Sings to My Embarrassment (White Pine Press, 2002), which examines post-revolutionary Cuba, exile in Miami, and the journey back. Eating Moors and Christians (CavanKerry Press, 2014), navigates the turbulent waters of Cuban history, evoking a place that feels at once forbidden and familiar. Castillo's poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Puerto del Sol, The Belleview Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. Her work has been featured in various anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (Norton, 2011), Approaching Literature in the 21st Century (Bedford/St. Martins, 2005), Like Thunder, Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa Press, 2002), American Diaspora, the Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa Press, 2002), Burnt Sugar, Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English & Spanish (Free Press, 2006), A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press, 1996), Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets (Persea, 1995), Little Havana Blues (Arte Publico Press, 1996), Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1998) and Cool Salsa: On Growing Up Latino in the U.S. (Henry Holt & Co., 1994), among others.