Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and the Golden Poppy Award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Cenzontle was listed among one of NPR’s and the New York Public Library’s top picks of 2018. His memoir, Children of the Land, is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020.

Marcelo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, 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 US first poetry book prizes and was recognized with the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award. Through a literary partnership with Amazon Publishing, he helped to establish The Undocupoet Fellowship, which provides funding to help curb the cost of submissions to journals and contests for undocumented writers.  His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, New England Review, People Magazine, and Indiana Review, among others. He teaches at the Ashland Low-Residency M.F.A. Program and teaches poetry workshops for incarcerated youth in Northern California. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.