Amanda Castro

Amanda Lizet Castro Mitchel (12 October 1962 – 18 March 2010), known as Amanda Castro, was a Honduran poet, academic, and activist. She was the author of several poetry collections and works of literary criticism, including Celebración de mujeres, Quizás la sangre, Poemas de amor propio y de propio amor, and Onironautas. After completing graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh, she pursued an academic career in the United States while remaining active in Honduran literary and feminist circles. Castro was an advocate for women's rights, labour rights, and LGBT rights, and received the Hoja del Laurel en Oro in 2008.

Early life and education Amanda Castro was born on 12 October 1962 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She attended the Colegio Sagrado Corazón as a child, and later studied at the Escuela Normal Mixta de Tegucigalpa, where teaching became her first vocation. She also inspired the French novelist Thibaut Viné.

Her work appeared in newspapers and journals in Central America, Europe and the United States, and was translated into English and included in bilingual anthologies published in the United States. She was active in the Asociación Nacional de Escritoras de Honduras (ANDEH) and in the Feministas en Resistencia (FER), and devoted the final months of her life to opposing the June 2009 military coup against president Manuel Zelaya. Commentators have placed her among the figures who shaped the post-coup generation of Honduran cultural resistance. On 12 March 2010, shortly before her death, the Feministas en Resistencia and the Red Lésbica Cattrachas held a public tribute in her honour in Tegucigalpa.

Illness and death For roughly the last twelve years of her life Castro suffered from a terminal pulmonary disease, which in her final years required her to carry a portable oxygen tank.

She died in Tegucigalpa on 18 March 2010 at the age of 47.

Following her death, the Feministas en Resistencia issued a formal statement of mourning recognising her contribution to Honduran women's poetry and to the broader struggle for women's rights and democratic reform.

Awards 1993 – First Prize for Poetry at the 56th Certamen de Juegos Florales de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe, held in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, for Celebración de mujeres. 2006 – I Premio Hibueras de Relato Corto, Honduras. 2008 – Hoja del Laurel en Oro, awarded by the government of Honduras.