Joy Castro is author of the literary thrillers Hell or High Water, Nearer Home, and Flight Risk; the short fiction collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received an International Latino Book Award. Her historical thriller about the 19th-century Cuban anti-colonial insurgency in Key West, One Brilliant Flame, was just released.

Castro is editor of the Machete series in literary nonfiction at the Ohio State University Press and edited the anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family. She is currently the Willa Cather Professor of Ethnic Studies and English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.