Marcelo Hernandez Castillo will be at the Selma Arts Center on Thursday, March 22 at 7PM to read from his new, award-winning collection Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018). The evening will include a reading, a Q/A with the author, and a book signing. Admission will be by donation. All proceeds will benefit Selma Arts Center’s upcoming production of REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES. This is the first of many literary events scheduled for the Selma Arts Center this year.
Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize and will be published by BOA editions in 2018. His first chapbook, DULCE, was chosen by Chris Abani as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and will be published by Northwestern University press in the fall of 2018. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins.
He was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated at the age of five with his family to the California central valley. As an AB540 student, he earned his 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. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award. Through a literary partnership with Amazon Publishing he has helped to establish The Undocupoet Fellowship which provides funding to help curb the cost of submissions to journals and contests.
A graduate of the Canto Mundo Latinx Poetry fellowship, he has also received fellowships to attend the Vermont Studio Center and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. He lectures at Sacramento State University and teaches summers at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
He is the translator of the Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman and is currently at work translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy. He co-translated the work of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe with C.D. Wright before her untimely passing.
His work has been adopted to Opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya and has appeared in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.