Writer and activist Daisy Hernández, whose memoir of finding herself and her community has earned praise from critics as diverse as Jezebel, the Kirkus Review, the Washington Blade, and the Boston Globe, will speak on April 5 at the Rose O’ Neill Literary House. The last in the “Queer Voices” series at the Literary House, this talk, which begins at 4:30, is free and open to the public.
In her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce girls with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless; he’s simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa. The book is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life. Guernica Magazine praised it as a “heartbreaking, wish-I-had-this-when-I-was-growing-up debut” that “mixes prose you can taste with memoir, narrative, and social criticism in a way that’s necessary and reflective of real life.”
Hernández is also the co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Her essays have been published in the Bellingham Review, CultureStrike, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, and Hunger Mountain. As a journalist, she has written for The Atlantic, ColorLines, The New York Times, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She is a board member of Iris Films, a feminist documentary film company.
An assistant professor in creative writing at Miami University in Ohio, Hernández earned a master’s in journalism and Caribbean and Latin American studies at New York University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Miami. To see more of her work, visit www.daisyhernandez.com.
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.