"Castillo's characters are a Chicano variation of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," sleepless souls lost in their own thoughts," Jacinto Jesus Cardona, author of Pan Dulce: Poems These eleven tightly-packed short stories, often allegorical yet visceral, range from the phantasmagorical "Aurora", whose misdeed has condemned her to a cyclical river of Eternal Return, to the agnostic Tomas and faithful Pedro in the theological "Penitent of Guadalupe Street", where truth is an enigma wrapped in a metaphor. In another story, a bellicose dwarf is murdered and the story is told from shifting points of view. In "Dwarfs and Penitents," an angry jilted husband searches the cobblestone streets of Prague in search of vengeance, while in "The Sands of Dhahran," a middle-age soldier battles his demons during Operation Desert Storm. In these luminous stories, Castillo give us penitents, dwarfs, lost youth, WWII vets, pachucos, doppelgangers, and memorable others populating the American literary landscape"
--from Amazon.com
"Rafael Castillo teaches writing and literature at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of Distant Journeys, and his writing has appeared in The Arizona Quarterly, College English, Imagine, English Journal, Frank, New Mexico Humanities Review, Puentes, Southwestern American Literature, Saguaro, and ViAztlán. His fiction has also been widely syndicated and anthologized in Under the Pomegranate Tree (Washington Square Press), Lone Star Literature (W.W.Norton), Hispanic Link, (Washington, DC) and New Growth (Corona Press). "Castillo has a poet's feel for language and a gritty sense of urban reality. Aurora and other stories is a welcome addition to the growing body of Mexican American literature,"
--Amazon.com
A veteran free-lance writer, Castillo authored articles germane to the Mexican American community and established philosophy-based issues and supported international causes that promoted Mexican American arts and letters.
In 1985, Castillo was selected as the first English faculty at Palo Alto College and the subsequent year became its first chairperson. The college opened in 1985 and is located in the Southside of San Antonio. In 1987, Rafael Castillo was awarded the first Palo Alto College Teaching Excellence Award ($2,000/laptop) voted at-large by the Faculty Senate, and the following year, the National Council of Teachers of English awarded him the English Journal Writing Award.
A graduate of St. Mary's University (B.A.), the University of Texas at San Antonio (M.A.) and Capella University in Minnesota (PhD), Rafael Castillo was one of the early free-lance writers whose contributions opened the door for Hispanics in mainstream journalism.
Currently, Rafael Castillo is a tenured professor of English at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas.
--Wikipedia
