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Daisy Hernández
Memoir & Personal Growth
Daisy Hernández is a writer and editor and assistant professor whose nonfiction focuses on race, sexuality, immigration, and memoir about growing up queer in a Colombian‑Cuban family.
Biography
Daisy Hernández is a writer and editor in the United States and an assistant professor at Northwestern University. She coedited the essay collection Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press, 2002) and worked at ColorLines as a senior writer beginning in 2004, later editing the publication from 2008 to 2010.
Hernández's nonfiction includes the 2014 memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and the 2021 book The Kissing Bug, which documents Chagas disease in the United States. Her reportage and essays have been recognized in the field: her article "Becoming a Black Man" was nominated for a 2009 GLAAD Media Award, her 2011 All Things Considered commentary on the Arizona shooting provoked conservative criticism for its use of the word "gringo," she was a 2015 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, and The Kissing Bug was included in a 2022 Science + Literature selection and was a finalist for the 2021 New American Voices Award.
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Books by Daisy Hernández
A cup of water under my bed
A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014) is Hernández's memoir about growing up queer in a Colombian‑Cuban family, tracing language acquisition, coming out as bisexual, and early reporting work, and recounting negotiations with the women who raised her and societal expectations to "become white."