Sofía Fernández Castañón is a Spanish poet, writer, audiovisual producer, and politician. She has worked in print, television, and radio, and received several poetry prizes. Since January 2016 she has been deputy of Podemos for Asturias in Spain's 11th and Legislatures. She is currently spokesperson for the Equality Commission and a member of the Subcommittee on the State Pact on Gender Violence. On 18 February 2017, she was elected the Podemos Executive's Secretary of Intersectional Feminism and LGBTI. Since February 2017, she has been a member of the Podemos State Council.
Biography
One of Sofía Castañón's grandfathers was a foreman of mines, and her family comes from the. The daughter of Asturian writer Laura Castañón, she grew up surrounded by books. She studied Spanish Philology at the University of Oviedo, and combines her poetic activity with journalistic work and creative writing workshops. She has published several books of poetry in Castilian and Asturian, for which she has received awards such as the Asturias Joven in 2006, the Pablo García Baena de Poesía Joven in 2007, and the Nené Losada Rico in 2009. From 2009 to 2010 she was a scholarship holder for the City Council of Madrid in the Residencia de Estudiantes, and was one of La Casa Encendida's 2010 Voz + Joven poets. In 2010 and 2011 she directed the radio showEl sillón Voltaire on Radio del Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. From 2012 to 2015 she coordinated municipal reading clubs in Gijón and gave workshops on literary creation and audiovisual narrative, as well as participating in the humorous collective Fundición Príncipe de Astucias. She participates in the audiovisual production company Señor Paraguas, for which she has created music videos, documentaries, and video art, focusing on culture from a social and political perspective. She directed her first feature film with this company in 2014, the documentary Se dice poeta. In it, Castañón interviews 21 women born between 1974 and 1989 to discuss their relationship with poetry, criticism, and the dissemination of their work. Taking as a starting point the question about why the term poetess may be preferred if the definition of the word poet encompasses both men and women, this documentary looks at the role of gender in the current poetic panorama in Spain. In the media she has worked at,, and. For Televisión del Principado de Asturias, she directed the collection Dicires, a visual dictionary of Asturian in 120 clips. She has also written articles for media outlets such as El Comercio, La Corriente Alterna, La Nueva España, Hesperya, Diagonal, and the Huffington Post.
Political career
From January 2015 to February 2017 Castañón was a member of the Citizen Council of Podemos Xixón. In July 2015, she participated in the Podemos state primaries in the list promoted by the national management of Pablo Iglesias, and which was included on the alternative list proposed by the Asturian and Andalusian groups. She was the candidate who received the most votes, with 36,685. During the Constituent Session of the Congress of the 11th Legislature, she used Asturian to pledge her position with the following formula: "I promise to abide by this Constitution and work to change it. For the memory of our grandmothers, for the future of our children. Never again a country without its people and its towns." She returned as a candidate in the general elections of July 2016 and was reelected to her seat in the Congress of Deputies, where she is currently the spokesperson of the Equality Commission and a member of the Subcommittee on the State Pact on Gender Violence. At the Vistalegre II meeting she was a candidate on the Pablo Iglesias list and was elected a member of the Podemos State Citizen Council, ranking 14th with 3,574,113 points. On 18 February 2017, she was elected Secretary of Intersectional Feminism and LGBTI, a position that had not previously existed in the Podemos Executive, and that had been held by Clara Serra in the Citizen Council.
