Hendrix-Murphy Visiting Poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Castillo embraces an expansive ambiguity — of language, of gender, of nationality — that can sound celebratory and mournful at once.

The New York Times

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Children of the Land: A Memoir; Cenzontle, which was the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize; and Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize and, most recently, he is the co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora.

In 2015 Castillo co-founded Undocupoets to protest the immigration status-based, discriminatory practices of many poetry book contests. The Undocupoets advocacy helped eliminate citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the United States. For their work, the co-founders were awarded the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award established by Poets & Writers.

Castillo was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writer's Program at the University of Michigan. He currently teaches creative writing at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas and the Ashland University low-residency MFA program, as well as poetry workshops for incarcerated youth in Northern California as the Yuba and Sutter County Poet Laureate.

Children of the Land: A Memoir

An NPR Best Book of the Year • A 2020 International Latino Book Award Finalist • Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence.

“You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.”

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 of 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.

With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor.

Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.

Dulce: Poems

The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that admit the speaker’s attempt and possible failure to reconcile intimacy toward another and toward the self. The collection asks: what’s the point in any of this?—meaning, what’s the use of longing beyond pleasure; what’s the use of looking for an origin if we already know the ending?

Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions. He allows for the possibility of an and in a world of either/or.

These poems enact a prescient anxiety of what is to come, “I want to say all of this is true / but we both know it isn’t. . . . We already know what’s at the other end of this.” Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet.

Cenzontle

Winner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers Award • NPR Best Book of 2018

In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn―sometimes all at once.

Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora

By: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin

A lush tapestry of poetry and prose, Here to Stay is an invitation to engage with a new field of contemporary American poetry.

“I cannot separate my work from my undocumented identity.” —Aline Mello

From the indomitable writers and activists Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo comes an anthology gathering some of the best work from currently and formerly undocumented poets, as well as poets from mixed status families from across the undocumented diaspora in America. Here to Stay is a collection of honest, searing, and evocative poems interspersed with short personal narratives. Deeply intimate, these works explore how to exist in the space between the familiar and the unknown, between the safety of silence and the desire to share. Highlighting the significant insights of undocumented poets, this brilliant compendium challenges misconceptions of what it means to live and write as an undocumented person in modern America.

Beautiful, poignant, and timely, this must-read collection is a rich and essential new chapter in the ongoing story of the eclectic immigrant experience and the United States itself.

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