Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is 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. The book was named a top 10 nonfiction book of 2021 by Time magazine and was a finalist for the New American Voices Award. She has spoken about the subject of her book—neglected disease and racial disparities in healthcare—on MSBNC and also with the Carter Center and the Pan American Health Organization.

Her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed (Beacon Press, 2014) won the IPPY Award for best coming-of-age memoir and Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award. The memoir was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist.

She co-edited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press), which was first published in 2002 and has become a widely taught text in women’s and gender studies courses. She coedited a new edition in 2019, and the anthology has been praised by scholars and media outlets including USA Today and Buzzfeed for its contribution to understandings of intersectionality.