Joy Castro Books In Order

Publication Order of Nola Cespedes Mysteries Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Joy Castro is a bestselling and award winning author of literary fiction best known for the “Nola Cespedes” series of novels. The short story and literary fiction author has received several awards over the years, including the International Latino Book Award and the Nebraska Book Award.

Castro has also edited the “Family Trouble” anthology and was the judge of the Creative Nonfiction Award for CRAFT. In her earlier years, Joy worked at Vanderbilt University, where she was writer in residence. She now works for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a Willa Cather Professor of Ethnic and English Studies.

Castro is also an award winning teacher who has been responsible for the publishing of innovative strategies for teaching college students. Her published literary work has focused on themes of race, gender and class in the work of experimental female authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Joy published “Hell or High Water,” the first novel of the “Nola Cespedes” series of novels in 2012.

While Joy Castro currently makes her home in Lincoln Nebraska, she lived all over the US before settling in the state. She was brought up in West Virginia, London and Miami and as an adult lived in Indiana and Texas, before she finally made her home in Nebraska.

While she loved Vanderbilt University and Nashville, the chance to become director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies and Willa Cather Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was too good to pass up.

In addition to her scholarly work on modernism, film and working class and Latinx literature, she has also published a collection of short stories, a memoir, two crime novels and an essay collection.

Her short stories and essays have been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies such as The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, North American Review, Fourth Genre and Quarterly West.

One of his most popular memoirs is “The Truth Book” in which he describes what it was like to be brought up in a devout Jehovah’s Witnesses family. She suffered a lot of sexual, physical and emotional abuse before she finally made the escape and went to college and graduate school.

As for how Joy Castro got into writing, she has said that she began writing as soon as she could hold a crayon. She so loved books growing up, that she was inspired to write her first work just for the glory of writing.

She never could get enough books and by the time she was three years old, she was writing her short stories on memon pads that her father would get for her to draw on. She would usually pen her short stories and proceed to illustrate them with animal pictures she got from newspapers.

When she went on car trips with her parents, she often closed her eyes and watched the stories she wanted to write in her mind. When she was six years old, the class teacher asked what they wanted to be and when everyone was saying ballerina and fireman she said she would grow up to become an author.

It is important to remember that Joy Castro did not grow up in a literary family as neither of her parents was college educated. At some point her mother cleaned other people’s houses and they even lived on food stamps for a time while they resided at a trailer park.

Still she got a lot of encouragement as her mother read to her and her father was an encouraging, playful and kind man who encouraged her to pursue her interest.

“Hell or High Water” by Joy Castro is a tightly written thriller set after the events of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It is a story that will get its readers ready to hop on the next flight to New Orleans.

The lead in the novel is a gritty and gutsy aspiring journalist even though it is her love-hate relationship with the decadent and gorgeous city of New Orleans providing a great feel to the novel. Castro writes delicious, detailed and lush descriptions of the city but even better ones of the food.

Nola is a girl that came from the projects and went to a prestigious university and is what you would call a diamond in the rough. But she still comes with some rough edges even though she now has a promising job at the biggest paper in the city, and an eclectic collection of acquaintances and friends.

Nonetheless, her life is full of unresolved issues that manifest in a runaway mouth, binge drinking, risky and promiscous sex. When she gets the opportunity to write a groundbreaking feature on sexual predators, she takes it and is soon deep researching the issues.

Too bad it means she has to interview some dangerous perverts and ultimately uncovers some secrets from the dark past.

Joy Castro’s novel “Nearer Home” is the story of Nola Cespedes who while doing her early morning run in New Orleans’ Audubon Park stumbles upon the body of her former professor. Dr Judith Taffner was a Tulane University professor who taught journalism when Nola was a student there.

When she graduated, she went on to find a job with the Times-Picayune newspaper as an investigative journalist. It is not long before she is in the middle of a cause, which brings her great excitement in addition to great sadness. Her nose for news tells her that the death of the professor is going to be great as a news item.

After she records a statement with the police, she goes on a quest to find the man who killed the professor. She manages to break into the victims office, where she extracts a flash drive that once belonged to the victim. The more she investigates the death of the professor, the more she is convinced that there was foul play.

Since she does not have a lot of faith in the police department, she decides to do more than she should. Full of detailed writing, it shows the doorsteps and paths of the amazingly beautiful Big Easy in a way no other writer does.