About

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Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), which won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. The book was named a top 10 nonfiction book of 2021 by Time magazine and was a finalist for the New American Voices Award. She has spoken about the subject of her book—neglected disease and racial disparities in healthcare—on MSNBC and also with the Carter Center and the Pan American Health Organization.

Her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed (Beacon Press, 2014) won the IPPY Award for best coming-of-age memoir and Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award. The memoir was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist.

She co-edited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press), which was first published in 2002 and has become a widely taught text in women’s and gender studies courses. She coedited a new edition in 2019, and the anthology has been praised by scholars and media outlets including USA Today and Buzzfeed for its contribution to understandings of intersectionality.

Her work has been reprinted in several anthologies including the Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, and her essays and fiction have appeared in numerous publications including Aster(ix), Bellingham Review, Brevity, Dogwood, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, and Rumpus, among others. She is a contributor to the Buddhist magazine, Tricycle.

A journalist, she has reported for National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate, and her writing has been aired on NPR's All Things Considered. Her magazine feature on transgender issues in communities of color was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award.

She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Djerassi Artist-in-Residence, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook, and she currently serves on the board of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

on a personal note...

I grew up in New Jersey where I heard the best stories about Cuba and Colombia and this lady who knows how to eat an avocado so you won’t get pregnant. It’s also where I first learned about feminism, queer identity, race and immigration in the Americas. You can read these stories in my memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, which won the 2015 IPPY award for best coming-of-age memoir and the 2014 Bisexual Book Award for best memoir. The memoir is available in Spanish with a new afterword about underwear and the politics of language.

photo courtesy of Jamaica Gilmore

As a memoirist, journalist and cultural activist, I’ve been speaking at colleges, conferences and organizations for more than a decade on feminism, race, immigration, queer issues, and spirituality. I love sharing with audiences the lessons I’ve learned and the ways that we can create inclusive and racially just communities.

Though I knew I wanted to be writer when I was a teenager, I didn’t know where to start and my parents who worked in factories had no idea either. Luckily a mentor pushed me during my college years to apply for publishing internships, and I landed at Ms., the iconic feminist magazine. At 25, the magazine invited me to write a regular column, and then with my comadre, the author Bushra Rehman, I co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. That edition came out in 2002. USA Today calls the book 1 of the “27 Things To Read If You Care About Women Of Color.” I’m thrilled to share that a new edition of Colonize This! was published in 2019 with new essays from young women of color on gun violence in Black communities, undocumented migrant organizing, transgender motherhood, and much more.

My work with Ms. magazine and my master’s degree from NYU’s journalism school took me to the New York Times where I reported for the Metro desk on fires, the flagging economy, community gardens and how undocumented immigrants decide whether to file tax returns. At ColorLines, a newsmagazine on race and politics, I worked with a virtual, multi-racial newsroom of reporters, activists, and bloggers. During my tenure as managing editor, ColorLines was awarded UTNE’s General Excellence Award in 2007, and my ColorLines article “Becoming a Black Man” about how transgender people of color experience race when they transition was nominated for a 2009 GLAAD Media Award.

And then I ended up on Fox News.

Well, my writing did. I wrote a commentary that aired on NPR's All Things Considered, and Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams blasted me for "injecting race" into the news. I still take that as a compliment.

I put journalism on hold in 2011 to pursue my MFA in fiction and ended up writing the nonfiction book The Kissing Bug Disease: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, which was published by Tin House in 2021. BuzzFeed called it “a trenchant work of investigative journalism …weaving in cultural and political analysis, extensive research, and personal history” and the Washington Post noted: “It’s lyrical, unflinching and horrifying in turns. Hernández expertly skates the line between memoir and science tome, showing the personal effects of a disease perpetuated by a cascade of systemic failures.” The book is about Chagas, a long-neglected parasitic disease that affects an estimated 300,000 Latinx migrants in the United States and millions more in South America, Central America and Mexico. In the book, I chronicle how the disease took my auntie’s life and how it is affecting families across the United States.

The educational details: I received a B.A. in English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. I have an M.A. in journalism and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Miami in Florida.