California State University, Bakersfield's "Chicana Experience" course along with campus and community sponsors will host an afternoon of literature, poetry, and music featuring author and poet Ana Castillo on Friday, May 26 at 1 p.m. in the Student Union multipurpose room. Castillo is the culminating speaker for the Chicana/o Lecture Series.

In her work, Castillo explores Chicana and feminist themes in books such as her 1999 "Peel My Love Like an Onion" and her recently released "Watercolor Women, Opaque Men."

Castillo is a professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago. She has worked in several genres including poetry, fiction, critical essays and playwriting throughout her 30 year career. She has also been published in multiple anthologies and has written 17 books.

Castillo was born in Chicago and earned her bachelor's of arts at Northeastern Illinois University in 1975. She earned her master's of arts at the University of Chicago and her doctorate at the University of Bremen, Germany, in 1991. In 1989-1990, Castillo was a dissertation fellow and lecturer in Chicana feminist literature in the department of Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Chicana/o Lecture Series is free and open to the public. Refreshments will also be served. A book signing will immediately follow the reading from 3 to 4 p.m.

Campus sponsors include the Chicano studies program and lecture series; Club Soc; Student Affairs; Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MECHA; Associated Students, Inc.; and CSUB's Faculty for Social Awareness. And in CSUB's partnership with the Bakersfield community additional sponsors are the Chicana Book Club; the Latina Leaders of Kern County; Margarita Posadas, educator; and entertainment by guitarist and professor Jose Reyna and his accompanist Saul Rico.

For more information, please call Edna Molina at (661) 654-6876, or visit http://www.csub.edu/~emolina3.

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