Joy Castro

Joy Castro is the award-winning author of One Brilliant Flame (2023), a historical suspense novel about 19th-century Cuban insurgents in Key West; Flight Risk (2021), a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water (2012), which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home (2013), which have been published in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire; the story collection How Winter Began (2015); the memoir The Truth Book (2012); and the essay collection Island of Bones (2012), which received the International Latino Book Award. She is the series editor of the Machete series in literary nonfiction at The Ohio State University Press and edited the anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family (2013). She is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.