Darrell Kastin

Darrell Kastin was born in Los Angeles, California, of Portuguese and Russian-Jewish descent. His maternal ancestors came from the Azores, settling in the United States at the end of World War II. He has spent considerable time on the islands over the years, using them as a setting for many of his short stories and novels.

His debut novel, The Undiscovered Island, published in 2009, won the 2010 Silver IPPY Independent Publisher's Award for Multicultural Fiction. Currently out of print, a new revised edition will soon be forthcoming with an introduction by award-winning author Katherine Vaz, who wrote "What a wild, big, gorgeous book! Amazing, amazing. Metaphor and myth turn into history and history explodes into human connection...the pages are saturated with such fine sea mist..."

A collection of stories, The Conjurer and other Azorean Tales was published in December 2012 by Tagus Press. It won the 2014 USA Best Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and the 2014 Global Ebook Award Silver Medal for both Short Stories/Fiction and Fiction/Multicultural.

His short fiction has appeared in The Seattle Review, The Crescent Review, The Blue Mesa Review, The Windsor Review, NEO Magazine, and elsewhere, including, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora in the United States and Canada: an anthology, and in the forthcoming anthology, Portuguese Heritage.

In 2011 Kastin released a cd titled "Mar Português/Portuguese Sea." Kastin plays guitar & piano, accompanied by his daughter Shawna Lenore on vocals. The songs are poems by two of Portugal's finest poets, Florbela Espanca & Fernando Pessoa, which Kastin set to music. The cd, which was recorded in Lisbon, features Pedro Barroso as guest vocalist on two songs.

A new novel, Shadow Boxing with Bukowski, a fictionalized memoir based on his days as a San Pedro bookstore owner, will be published by Fomite Press on May 1,2016.

Kastin is currently working on a book titled A Tale of the Azorean Nights, a novel of interconnected stories, which is a sequel of sorts to the Undiscovered Island.

For more visit www.darrellkastin.com; www.facebook.com/DarrellKastinAuthor; or goodreads.