ANA CASTILLO

ANA CASTILLO

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Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead

One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

MARILYN MINTER

MARILYN MINTER

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Artist

That's what my work is about. Women owning agency. Any kind. And that's what makes you really excited. Having agency. Sexual agency. Owning sexuality not being the object of it.

I don't really look for inspiration. I just let it come to me, but I don't stop working. So work comes from work. So when I'm stuck I just keep working and make terrible looking things until something else comes out of it. That's the creative process. Work comes from work. You can't think yourself out a right action. You have to act yourself into right thinking. You can't sit there and smoke cigarettes and look at the wall waiting for inspiration.