Writer Ana Castillo comes to the Olympic Peninsula April 20-22.

She is the ninth Peninsula College writer-in-residence and will be featured in three free public events:

_ "A Conversation with Ana Castillo" is at 1 p.m. Monday, April 20, in Room J-47 in the Pirate Union Building at the college, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., Port Angeles. The focus is members of the Chicano/Latino community, life as an immigrant and border issues.

_ The Foothills Writers Series and Studium Generale co-host her keynote reading at noon Tuesday, April 21, in the Little Theater at the college.

_ A reading and book signing are at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., Wednesday evening, April 22. It is co-sponsored by Port Book and News.

Donna Seaman in Booklist said of Castillo, "Whether (she) is writing poetry, essays, or fiction, her work sizzles with equal measures of passion and intelligence."

Castillo also is a poet, short story writer, playwright and essayist.

She earned a bachelor's degree from Northeastern Illinois University and a master's degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Chicago. She has been a dissertation fellow in the Chicano Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Bremen in Germany. Castillo won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her work has won the 2006 Independent Publisher's Story Teller of the Year Award, The Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for "The Mixquiahuala Letters" (1987), the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction and the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Award for "So Far From God."

The Writer_in_Residence Program is supported by the Peninsula College Foundation, the college's Office of Cultural Events, the Office of Student Development and the Sound of Unity Series.