Joy Castro is the award-winning author of One Brilliant Flame, a historical novel of nineteenth-century Cuban 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 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 Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, Senses of Cinema, Salon, Gulf Coast, Brevity, Afro-Hispanic Review, Seneca 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.
Workshop
Making the Marble: A Generative Workshop for Writers of Fiction and Nonfiction
While sculptors chisel away everything that isn't the statue, writers must first make their own marble—generate their own new rough drafts, and plenty of them—before they can chisel away all that isn't art. In this workshop, we will use powerful, proven prompts and methods that work to elicit new material, and you'll leave with drafts of half a dozen new pieces in the genre of your choice.
