Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is the author of Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth (Hogarth Press, 2026), a work that blends family memoir with global history to examine the changing meaning of citizenship and challenge dominant narratives about belonging in the United States. She is also the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), which won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program.

Her earlier books include the award‑winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed, about growing up in a Colombian‑Cuban family, and co‑editing the influential feminist anthology Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Hernández has worked as a reporter for The New York Times and as editor of ColorLines, and her essays and reporting on race, immigration, class, sexuality, and public health have appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, Slate, Guernica, National Geographic, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Code Switch. She is an associate professor of English and director of the English major in writing at Northwestern University.