Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas is a writer, editor and professor at Lehman College. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Mexican parents and grew up in Ithaca, New York. Both of her parents are professors and taught in schools like University of Oklahoma and Cornell University. She has published her own poems and a range of books. She has also edited poetry, a novel and books.
Dr. Castillo attended college at the New York University and finished her masters at Fordham University and her PhD at Yale University. She has been teaching at Lehman College for three years and prior she worked as a postdoc at Harvard University. She was also a teaching assistant at Yale for two years.
She has expressed she is her greatest obstacle when it comes to publishing her material. Her most recent book A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, took her about 10 years to research and became her baby. She was proud of her work because she was able to return to the people she researched and provide them a book based on them and their stories. A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture is based on Mexican undocumented immigrants living in New York City. It touches on the hardships between Mexicans and Black discrimination. Coatlicue Eats the Apple is a book of poems also based on the Mexican American experience in New York City. It is filled with poems that are relatable to everyone in the culture. ¡MANTECA!: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AFRO-LATINO POETRY is a book of poems written with 40 poets and it filled with representation and experience for Afro-Latinos.
One of her greatest influence is Gloria Anzaldúa who is a Chicana female theorist. She first read her text in college and it was something she could relate to because Anzaldúa spoke about not feeling good enough about her Spanish. Until this day her text still resonates with her as a young Mexican woman.
She teaches in the English department at Lehman college and is the faculty advisor of the Latinx Student Alliance.The lack of women representation in literature influenced her in the career path she has taken. Much of the curriculum taught in schools are taught from the lens of white men. As a member of the English department, she and her students demanded Lehman College to change the curriculum. They wanted to see more Black and Latinx work being taught because it is a representation of the demographic on campus. She is famous among the student body for her Latinx literature course.
In Mexico I am neither brown nor white
I am gringa (querida)
La Meli Gabacha
And here
I wonder how many times
l’ll have to slice the tongue
from my mouth.
COATLICUE EATS THE APPLE. (2016). Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas. http://www.melissacastilloplanas.com/coatlicue-eats-the-apple.html
