A Cup of Water Under My Bed

Daisy Hernández is an award-winning feminist writer, editor, and cultural critic who speaks and writes about gender, sexuality, and race. Her parents emigrated to the United States in the 1970s to work in textile factories, and she grew up in New Jersey with her parents, her sister, and three aunts. Her mother is Colombian, and her father is Cuban. The intersection of gender, race, class, and sexuality shapes Hernández’s memoir as she reflects on her family’s position within US society, her sometimes-conflicted relationship with her parents and aunts, and her identity as a queer Latina coming of age in the 1990s.

She began her career as a researcher and journalist with the New York Times before she became the editor of Colorlines magazine, a national publication that centers race and politics. Most recently, she published The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (2021), which focuses on Chagas disease, the disease that killed her Tía Dora. This book was named a Top 10 Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by TIME magazine. It also won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award in 2022, which recognizes a book that “reshap[es] the boundaries of its form and signal[s] strong potential for lasting influence.