Marcelo Hernandez Castillo | |
|---|---|
| Born | Zacatecas, Mexico |
| Alma mater | Sacramento State University, University of Michigan |
| Genre | Poetry |
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, born 1988, is a poet and activist. [1] [2] He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son. [3]
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. He moved to the United States at five years of age. [1] His family settled in Yuba City, California, where his mother worked at a prune factory off Highway 113. [3] In 2003, Castillo's father was deported. [3] In 2017, the U.S. government allowed his parents to move back to Yuba City and apply for asylum. [3]
He received a BA from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to earn an MFA from the University of Michigan. [1] He teaches at the low-residency MFA program in Ashland University, [4] as well as to incarcerated youth in northern California. [5] He has taught as a resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, [6] and for low-income high school students in the Upward Bound program at UC Davis. [3] He works within the Yuba-Sutter area as a substitute teacher.
Castillo's poems and essays can be found in BuzzFeed , Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast , Indiana Review , Jubilat, Muzzle Mag, New England Review , The Paris American, and Southern Humanities Review among others.
Along with C.D. Wright, Castillo has translated the poems of Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe. [6]
Castillo's manuscript, Cenzóntle, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as the 2017 winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, from BOA Editions. [7] It won the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. [8] His chapbook, Dulce, was selected by Chris Abani, Ed Roberson, and Matthew Shenoda for the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. [9]
A Pushcart nominee, Castillo has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Squaw Valley Writer's Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Castillo was a founder, with poets Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto (AKA Loma), of the Undocupoets campaign which eliminated citizenship requirements from major first poetry book prizes in the United States. [11] With the Sibling Rivalry Press Foundation and Amazon Literary Partnership, the Undocupoets Fellowship awards two $500 fellowships to former or current undocumented poets in support of poetry-related costs. [12]