The San Antonio Book Festival - A Program of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation
San Antonio Book Festival - Daisy Hernández
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Book Festival Author

Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed won Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a Publishing Triangle Award finalist. She coedited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.

Her latest book is Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth.

More About Daisy Hernández

  • Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth

    In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernández fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and politics: citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family’s stories—her mother arrived from Colombia, while her father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba—Hernández shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth, one of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche.

    Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, "Citizenship" is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar’s mind and memoirist’s gift for narrative, Hernández weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country’s ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, "Citizenship" is a powerful portrait of one family’s experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country in which we live.

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