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Daisy Hernández

Famous Bis

Daisy Hernández is the author of the 2014 award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and is currently an assistant professor at Northwestern University.

Her memoir is a coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of her own multicultural home where her first language was Spanglish. The memoir began as an exploration of Hernández’s own sexuality.

Writing about my own life was my attempt to answer the questions I had. What did it mean to be bi coming from a Cuban-Colombian home? What did it mean that I longed to be normal?[1]

From 2008 to 2010, Hernández edited ColorLines, where she began working as a senior writer in 2004. While there, her 2009 article “Becoming a Black Man”, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for “Outstanding Magazine Article”.

She has gone on to write two additional books, The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (2021), which won a PEN America Jean Stein Book Award, and Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2022).