Cruel April: Marcelo Hernández Castillo and Dashel Hernández Guirado

Join Point of Contact for a poetry reading by two poets: Marcelo Hernández Castillo and Dashel Hernández Guirado, as part of its annual Cruel April poetry reading series commemorating National Poetry Month.

Marcelo Hernández Castillo, poet and activist born in Zacatecas, Mexico and living in California, teaches in the MFA program at Ashland University, as well as to incarcerated youth in northern California. Hernández 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, Hernández Castillo translated the poems of Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe. His manuscript, Cenzóntle, was selected as the 2017 winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, from BOA Editions. It won the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His chapbook, Dulce, was selected for the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. A Pushcart nominee, Castillo has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. Castillo was a cofounder of the Undocupoets campaign which eliminated citizenship requirements from major first poetry book prizes in the United States. Hernández Castillo was the first undocumented student to earn an MFA from the University of Michigan.

Dashel Hernández Guirado is an up-and-coming Cuban poet and visual artist living and working in Miami, Florida. He has actively contributed and participated in numerous arts and literature education programs working with Latino youth while residing in Syracuse, NY (2017-2019). He has published three poetry collections: Meditaciones (Ácana, 2015), Iluminaciones (Homagno, 2020), and El ancho río del silencio (Selvi, 2020), and his first novel, Herbario: 1978-1983 (Kýrne, 2023). His work explores personal and collective memories of Cuba in the 1980s from the perspectives of nostalgia, post-memory, and counter-memory. His work has been published, reviewed, and translated in Deinós, a critical journal on poetry and translation edited by Dr. Yoandy Cabrera, at Rockford University, Illinois (2020).

This program is funded in part by Syracuse University and by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional funding comes from the Engaged Humanities Network and the Latino-Latin American Studies Program at Syracuse University.

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