Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of CENZONTLE, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award, and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine and "PBS Newshour," among others. He lives in Marysville, California, where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.

Books by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Children of the Land: A Memoir

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo - Memoir, Nonfiction

When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary. In CHILDREN OF THE LAND, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives.