Elaine Castillo

“How do we hold ourselves accountable—the root of the word accountable meaning: how do we let the story of ourselves be told? How do we hold ourselves accountable to the things we’ve received and internalized: the knowledges and unknowledges, the narratives, silences, and violences, the particularities? To hold ourselves accountable—to truly hold ourselves, within the depth and vastness of our stories, and remain there, in their thrumming inconsolability—means that in our art, we bring to bear not our most powerful, authoritative, intelligent selves, but: our most particular, our most precarious, our most dependent selves.”

Whiting Award

NPR Best Book of the Year

VONA Foundation Fellow

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Excerpt from America is not the heart

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“Castillo raises the bar for writing about tech and virtual reality, family stories, and workplace romances. Castillo’s gorgeous prose infuses both the real world and the virtual reality landscapes with life. Girlie is an exceptional protagonist, defined by her cutting humor and dogged, almost maniacal independence and rounded out by her fondness for her exuberant, naïve cousin Maribel, the rawness of her feelings for William, and her yearning for true happiness, if she can find a way to let it in. A brilliant novel with much to say about work, family, excess, identity, and love.”

— Kirkus Reviews starred review for Moderation

“Castillo shifts seamlessly in scale and tone, from a wide-angled systems novel to a love story, and from barbed satire to staggering emotional depth. It’s a triumph.”

— Publishers Weekly starred review for Moderation

“I gasped, shouted, and holler-laughed while reading these essays from the phenomenal Elaine Castillo. What powerful writing, what a rigorous mind. For as long as I live, I want to read anything Castillo writes, and you probably do, too.”

— R.O. Kwon on How to Read Now

“Castillo’s How To Read Now took my breath away. Energetically brilliant, warmly humane, incisively funny, it whips the tablecloth from under the setting of contemporary reading, politics and intellectual culture in a literary act of daring. It seems there is nothing Castillo can not do. Read How to Read Now now.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

“Elaine Castillo’s entrancing and magnificent debut is set to be a standout work of literature. Don’t say you were not told. What a dazzling book!”

— NoViolet Bulawayo

“Hungrily ambitious in sweep and documentary in detail, and reads like a seismograph of the aftershocks from trading one life for another . . . Like Bulosan, [Castillo] channels a righteous anger, revisiting America’s historical crimes.”

— New York Times Book Review

“Elaine Castillo’s blazing debut America Is Not The Heart springs alive from the first page. Her characters—Filipina and Filipina-American women living in San Francisco’s South Bay—are Technicolor-vivid, flawed and heroic, and her prose is as good as it gets. Castillo’s food writing will make your mouth water, and her love scenes will make your heart pound. Ambitious, sexy, sprawling and open-armed, America Is Not the Heart is the start of a phenomenal career.”

— NPR

“I’ve been saying to everyone who will listen that this book is the next big thing—you heard it here first. My new favorite book, and maybe yours, too . . . This is Castillo’s first novel, and it is masterful. It has drama and tragedy in spades, but it also has so much love of every kind spilling out of its pages that I closed it each night with a huge, warm smile. I might go home and read it again.”

— The Paris Review

Named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times, Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her most recent novel, Moderation (Viking Press, 2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize in Fiction and the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also named one of the Top Ten Books of 2025 by The Atlantic and Slate, and a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, and more. She is also the author of the acclaimed book of essays How to Read Now (Viking, 2022), about the politics and ethics of our reading culture. Her widely acclaimed debut novel, America Is Not the Heart (Viking, 2018), was a finalist for the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, the New York Public Library, and many others.

Her writing has appeared in Freeman’s, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Taste Magazine, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her short film, A Mukkbang, was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. She is the recipient of a 2026 Whiting Award for Fiction, a two-time San Francisco Public Library Laureate, and a Berkeley Public Library Laureate.

When asked about the ways in which the personal is political in America Is Not The Heart, she responded, “When it comes to political art as genre and aesthetic, I'm always conscious of the narrow, gendered assumption that 'serious' political content is about war, empire, and history. There is no lack of war or colonial history in the book. But it's equally important to me that a young, queer, Bay Area Pinay's relationship to makeup artistry, or a former NPA insurgent's feelings about romance manga, could also bear significant political resonance—which is to say, could also be as alive to our civic selves as to our private souls.”

Castillo attended UC Berkeley and received an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. In the tradition of diasporic mothers everywhere, she works primarily so her rescue German shepherd, Vincent, can live a better life.

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