The A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series continues this fall with Joy Castro on Thursday, Nov. 2, in the Drinko Library Atrium on Marshall University’s Huntington campus. In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, Marshall’s Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, Honors College and University Libraries present the award-winning author of Flight Risk.
Castro’s Flight Risk was a 2022 finalist for International Thriller Award; her post-Katrina New Orleans literary thriller Hell or High Water received the Nebraska Book Award and her novel Nearer Home was published in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire. Castro was also honored for a story collection How Winter Began, the memoir The Truth Book and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award.
Dr. Sara Henning, assistant professor of English and coordinator of the Stringer Visiting Writers Series at Marshall, organized the reading.
“Joy is an exceptional writer who spent many of her formative years in West Virginia, and I am so grateful that she will be sharing her work with our students and larger campus community,” Henning said. “I believe that our students will connect not only with Joy’s Appalachian roots, but with her hard-won path to success. As a first-generation college student, she has risen to become one of the most beloved Latinx literary voices of our time.”
Castro is also the 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. She’s the former Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, and currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she directs the institute for Ethnic Studies.
The reading is free and open to the public and can be streamed at www.marshall.edu/livestream.