How do we turn archival materials into fiction? How can we honor our cultural inheritance with our creative work? Novelist and critic Joy Castro will share the story of how she researched and wrote the historical novel One Brilliant Flame, set in 1886 amidst the anticolonial revolutionary émigré enclave in Key West, while—with the help of a brilliant scholar-translator—restoring her grandfather’s volume of 96 poems Lágrimas y flores, which appears in print for the first time since 1918 this October in a bilingual edition from the University Press of Florida as Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West.
Join us for this free, virtual event!
Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the 2023 historical novel One Brilliant Flame, set amidst the nineteenth-century anticolonial Cuban insurgent community in Key West; Flight Risk, a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, which have both been published in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire; the story collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award. She is also editor of the craft anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family and the founding series editor of Machete, a series in innovative literary nonfiction at The Ohio State University Press. Her work has appeared in venues including Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, Senses of Cinema, Salon, Gulf Coast, Brevity, Afro-Hispanic Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. A former Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, she is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies (Latinx Studies) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies. With translator and co-editor Rhi Johnson, she edited the bilingual edition of the 1918 poetry collection Lágrimas y flores by Feliciano Castro, forthcoming in October, 2024 from the University Press of Florida.
