About

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir (Harper Collins 2020), Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize (Northwestern University Press 2018) and he is the co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented  Diaspora (Harper Perennial 2024).  His work has received the Golden Poppy Award from the Norther California Independent Booksellers Association and the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for debut poetry. He has been a finalist for the California Book Award, the Foreword Indies Prize, the The Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Lambda Literary Award, among other recognitions and citations.  He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S, as well as fellowships such as the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lily Fellowship and for which he was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award. He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. He served as distinguished fellow for the Marshall Project’s Art For Justice initiative from the University of Arizona which advocates for prison reform and is an inaugural winner of the Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket books and the Mellon Foundation. He currently serves as faculty in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California and the Ashland University low-res MFA program.