January 11th: Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize Reading

Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize Release Reading featuring Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Matthew Shenoda, and Trio Alma Jarocha de Chicago

Thursday, January 11th, 7pm at the Poetry Foundation (61 W Superior St, Chicago, IL 60654), doors open at 6:30pm.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s chapbook Dulce won this year’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize and was recently published by Northwestern University Press. On January 11th Marcelo will be reading alongside acclaimed poet and Columbia College professor Matthew Shenoda, and with music from the Trio Alma Jarocha de Chicago.

The event is free and open to the public, and the author will be available to sign copies of Dulce after the reading.

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Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize and will be published by BOA editions in 2018. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins.

He was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated at the age of five with his family to the California central valley. As an AB540 student, he earned his B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award. 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.

He is the translator of the Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman and is currently at work translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy. He co-translated the work of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe with C.D. Wright before her untimely passing.

His work has been adopted to Opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya and has appeared in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.