Sandra Castillo

Sandra Castillo

Sandra M. Castillo is a poet and South Florida resident. She was born in Havana, Cuba and emigrated on one of the last of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Freedom Flights. Castillo's family's number for the Freedom Flights was 160,633. Sandra Castillo is not only a poet, but also a professor at Miami Dade College and she teaches in the History Department. She attended Florida State University, receiving both a Bachelor's and ultimately master's degree in Creative Writing. [Castillo has said that she is haunted by all things Cuban and that much of what she remembers about her Cuban childhood, those eight years of her life, linger in her memory like photographs, like ghosts. Her Tio Berto, to whom she has made repeated references, was an amateur photographer whose photographs documented not only her family's past but a Cuban life. Such photographs captivated her and "formed the basis of [her] aesthetic."] She writes about loss, history, gender, language and explores issues of memory. Her work "depicts contradictory worlds, the memory of a homeland and memory politics while examining the ordinary reality of exile. Her poetry is inspired by her childhood experiences, photographs, stories told by her family, arrests, and the streets and lives left behind in Cuba. She is inspired by poets like Jack Kerouac and the Chilean poet, Omar Lara. Similarly, her and Jack Kerouac "are fascinated by the history of place", and she was inspired by his attempt to "shape and define his world through his adopted language." Omar Lara's "ability to capture time and place at a critical time" inspired her to write a poem called, photograph.

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