FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 23, 2011
Contact: Corbett Estes
(662) 329-7119
cme@muw.edu

MUW’s Common Reading Initiative selects Joy Castro’s `The Truth Book’

COLUMBUS, Miss. -- Mississippi University for Women’s Common Reading Initiative, a program that encourages the campus community to read and come together to discuss a common book, has selected “The Truth Book” by Joy Castro for the fall semester.

Dr. Kendall Dunkelberg, professor of  English and director of creative writing, said, “It is a memoir of growing up as an adopted child in a family who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, being abused by a step-father, escaping this abusive relationship to live with her father and trying to rescue her brother.”

He added that one of the reasons this book was chosen for the CRI was that it provides an excellent example of how a person was able to escape the environment they were in by reading. 

“Reading gave her courage to question and ultimately find a way out of this abusive relationship,” stated Dr. Dunkelberg.

“The Truth Book” is Castro’s only published book. She has published stories and essays in magazines. Her debut novel, “Hell or High Water,” and a second collection of essays “Island of Bones” are due out next year. She is an associate professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She has a B.A. from Trinity University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. Her teaching and writing specialties are in memoir, fiction, U.S. ethnic literature, women’s literature and literary modernism.

Castro will be on MUW’s campus as part of the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium Oct. 20-22. She will meet with students of the Ina E. Gordy Honors College on the 19th and UN 101 Introduction to College students on the 20th.

For more information about the Symposium, visit www.muw.edu/welty or contact Dr. Dunkelberg at (662)329-7386. The Eudora Welty Symposium is also on Facebook, Goodreads and Twitter (@WeltySymposium).