Sandra M. 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. 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."