Elaine Castillo

America Is Not the Heart follows a former doctor from the Philippines, imprisoned and broken under Marcos, living with relatives in a California suburb and working out of a food truck, and it opens in the second person, addressed to her mother. Castillo takes the title from Carlos Bulosan and spends the novel arguing with him. How to Read Now is her essay collection on what readers have been trained to want from writers of colour. She was raised in the Bay Area and puts Tagalog and Ilocano into English with no italics and no glossary.