ANA CASTILLO is an award-winning poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator, and independent scholar. She has written more than twenty books in various genres, most recently Give It to Me and Black Dove, as well as So Far From God, Massacre of the Dreamers, and I Ask the Impossible. As a journalist and literary author, she has been a major force in the struggle for economic justice, women's rights, and civil liberties, and has won numerous awards and fellowships. In June 2015, Castillo was given the Lifetime Achievement Award in literature by Latina 50 Plus, a motivational organization based in the Bronx. Castillo holds a faculty post at the Bread Loaf program with Middlebury College in Santa Fe and teaches creative nonfiction. She is also the editor of La Tolteca.