Background

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in 1988 in Zacatecas, Mexico. His family moved to Yuba City, California, United States when he was five.

Education

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo studied at California State University, Sacramento where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. He also obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan where he was the first undocumented student to earn a degree.

Career

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is known as a poet, essayist, and translator. His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, People Magazine en Español, The Paris Review, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. In his poems, Castillo often engages naming and invisibility or misperception, using the body as a contested landscape. In a 2014 autobiographical essay for BuzzFeed, Castillo writes of the pressure of his undocumented status on his earliest work. He is the author of Cenzontle (2018) which maps a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality through surreal and deeply imagistic poems. Castillo’s first chapbook is Dulce (2018). His most recent book, memoir Children of the Land (2020) explores the ideas of separation from deportation, trauma, and mobility between borders.

Castillo is the translator of the Argentinian modernist poet Jacobo Fijman and works on translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy whose poems combine digital, environmental, and indigenous studies into a cosmopolitan melée specific to Mexico City. With poet C.D. Wright, Castillo has translated the work of Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe. Castillo’s work has been adopted to Opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya. Previously, he taught at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He currently teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University.

Achievements

• Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is an acknowledged poet, activist, and teacher. He received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the recipient of Golden Poppy Award from Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, New Writers Award in Poetry from Great Lakes Colleges Association, Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize, A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and Barnes & Noble "Writers For Writers Award." He was also the finalist for Lambda Literary Award, Publishing Triangle: Thom Gunn Award, California Book Award, and Northern California Book Award.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Children of the Land

    (When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and hi...)

    2020
  • Cenzontle: Poems

    (In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernande...)

    2018
  • Dulce: Poems

    (The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that ...)

    2018

Views

With Christopher Soto and Javier Zamora, Marcelo Castillo founded the Undocupoets Campaign in 2015 to protest publishers’ exclusion of undocumented writers from eligibility for most first-book contests. The campaign successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country. 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.

Quotations: "As with my life, I made myself invisible in my poems. I hungered for lyric rather than narrative because I was afraid of telling people who I was. I made myself invisible as a way of coping."

"Early on, I wrote safe poems and that was my biggest mistake. I want young undocumented writers to know that what they have is beautiful and that their work is important because it stems from them and not from what they read in the white canon."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Castillo compresses the emotional resonances of lived experience into poetic narratives of devotion, eroticism, family, labor, and migration. He makes displays of fragility and power by turn, a duality drawn into relief by the precarious condition of the undocumented immigrant."
  
  "In the spirit of Whitman, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo slips in silently to lie down between the bridegroom and the bride, to inhabit many bodies and many souls, between rapture and grief."
  
  "Castillo’s forms feel airy and fragile, but the strength of his revelations are unquestionable."

Connections

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is married. The marriage produced one child.