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Season 4. Episode 14: Renzo del Castillo: From Peru to America, a poet's journney
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Renzo's family was threatened when they lived in Peru by members of The Shining Path. Their lives were threatened repeatedly and even one of their nannies was found out to be a member of the terrorist organization. They had to leave everything they knew behind and start all over in America. They went from upper middle class in Peru to starting from scratch in the U.S. But they did it, and they thrived.
Renzo credits his family with surrounding him with art and literature. He fell in love with poetry and decided at the end of his college years, as a senior, to switch from a technical major to a major in English literature -- specifically poetry. A shock to his family, to be sure.
He was accepted in a poetry program at Cambridge, but he didn't have assurance he wouldn't be deported if he went. It was after 9-11 and things were more strict. So he studied in the U.S.
Returning to Miami to help his family, he ended up in healthcare and climbed the corporate ladder. But he never gave up his poetry and now he has a book of poems available on Amazon called "Still." It has recently become a bestseller in a number of categories.
From the description on Amazon:
Still is a collection of poems that focuses on the immigrant experience: a family's journey from Lima, Peru to Miami, Florida as political refugees and asylum seekers and the impact that had on the life of a boy as he grew into a man. Renzo Del Castillo's poems often reveal larger moral concerns, touching in their language the world of politics and betrayal that cannot help but impose upon the world of private language. That heritage of terror and exile that sometimes underlies these poems gives them a sense of history within the lyric confusions of a single life, capturing the idiosyncrasies of the Miami landscape as a destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrations that intersect with an evolving definition of American identity. These poems include reflections of memory and transition, as well as adaptation to new cultures and geographies, through an ethnographic lens. There is a lovely and intimate tone, used to remind the reader that imagination triumphs over, or sometimes through, adversity.
The mix of poet and corporate leader, immigrant who was granted political asylum, and citizen of the world is irresistible. Renzo teaches us how to connect with each other and leave things better than we found them.
Find his book here:
Amazon: https://a.co/d/fgAHznm
His Website and Socials:
www.renzodelcastillo.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elrenz
LinkedIn:
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Original music "Saturday Sway" by Brendan Talian (for all interviews before 2025)
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